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At a recent meeting of the 23-year-old MIT Entrepreneurs Club, one recent graduate of the Sloan School of Management described his plans for a business - one based on his solution to a little-recognized problem that currently costs airlines $10 billion a year. Another alumnus, an engineer who recently retired after a career in the telecom business, talked about his patented approach to fighting wildfires in remote locations. A new MIT graduate student, who just earned his undergraduate degree from the Institute this spring, spoke of three different startup businesses he's currently cultivating in his spare time - one of which he co-founded during his freshman year at the Institute.

"If any institution is equipped to handle questions of strategy, it is Harvard Business School, whose professors have coined so much of the strategic lexicon used in classrooms and boardrooms that it's hard to discuss the topic without recourse to their concepts: Competitive advantage. Disruptive innovation. The value chain."

The Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-Ed) brings together corporate leaders committed to delivering on the promise of quality education for all of the world's children. Our starting point is that education is the birthright of every child, the key to expanded opportunity, and a source of prosperity, employment and social cohesion. GBC-Ed members believe that their core business assets, social responsibility and philanthropy, when used in collaboration with government and other stakeholders, can be a powerful tool to achieve these shared goals. 

"If compared to the majority of businesses out there, universities and colleges have an advantage when it comes to social media: the student community. For the majority of students, the years spent at university is usually one of the most important and remarkable times. This makes it a good start point for colleges in social media - when you have a happy community of consumers who like what you have to offer, things are much easier."

Ideally, you'll find some time over the next few weeks to curl up with a good story. Or hey, at least that's what I look forward to on vacation. If you are looking for some books on entrepreneurship to read, or even to gift, here are some recommended books from 2010. There were a number of great business books published this year, many of which we reviewed here as part of ReadWriteWeb's "Weekend Reading" series. But here are a few of the standouts, startup books we've chosen specifically because they are such great stories

"It was about 12 or 13 years ago, that we decided to design a class website template. It seemed that student materials were heading online and at Melbourne Business School we opted for a faculty-designed solution. For those days, it was pretty slick and it was the main template used for about a decade. A few years ago, wanting more features the School moved to Blackboard. And when I got to the University of Toronto there Blackboard was again. My kids' school uses Blackboard. It is everywhere and it is terrible. While it has all the features you could want and it has some integration with University systems, it is very cumbersome to use. So much so that I kept its use to a minimum for my course this semester and opted for my own WordPress hosted solution."

"José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it's not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road that parallels a fetid canal. On a recent morning there was a 1940s-era tractor, a decaying boat in a ditch, and a herd of goats nibbling gray strands of grass. A cinder-block barrier separates the school from a wasteland-the far end of which is a mound of trash that grew so big, it was finally closed down. On most days, a rotten smell drifts through the cement-walled classrooms. Some people here call the school un lugar de castigo-"a place of punishment.""

"[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment. Slow hunch: John Snow, who discovered how cholera was spread, had no 'Eureka' moment "But in fact when you go back and you look at the history of innovation it turns out that so often there is this quiet collaborative process that goes on, either in people building on other peoples' ideas, but also in borrowing ideas, or tools or approaches to problems. "The ultimate idea comes from this remixing of various different components. There still are smart people and there still are people that have moments where they see the world differently in a flash. "But for the most part it's a slower and more networked process than we give them credit for."

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer - that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others - is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

There are plenty of business books written about leadership, but not every employee (or CEO) is a great leader. Likewise, although every teacher stands in front of a classroom of students, they're not all leaders in their schools. But they should be. With their newly released Teacher Leader Model Standards, the Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium wants to jump-start the conversation about "the knowledge, skills, and competencies that teachers need to assume leadership roles in their schools, districts, and the profession."

We live in a busy world. Whether you're looking around online or off, there's "stuff" going on all around us. Some of us are trying to keep up and some of us aren't. Either way, both parties are inevitably going to miss out on some of this "stuff" I'm alluding to. And that's because we all need to look at not only why we're missing out, but how we can avoid missing out on as much as we do. This is when levels of personal productivity come into play.

Over the years, MIT students have created an array of clubs, workshops and competitions to foster entrepreneurship and help those who aim to start businesses. Increasingly, though, entrepreneurship is not just an extracurricular activity but - in many cases - an integral part of students' academic work. In other cases, student research ends up becoming the core of a spinoff company.

In January, a time when many scientists concentrate on grant proposals, Jennifer D. Calkins and Jennifer M. Gee, both biologists, were busy designing quail T-shirts and trading cards. The T-shirts went for $12 each and the trading cards for $15 in a fund-raising effort resembling an online bake sale. The $4,873 they raised, mostly from small donations, will pay their travel, food, lab and equipment expenses to study the elegant quail this fall in Mexico.

Online versions of college courses are attracting hundreds of thousands of students, millions of dollars in funding, and accolades from university administrators. Is this fad, or is higher education about to get the overhaul it needs?

"Everyone knows a name dropper when they hear one. Buzz names like Gates, Jiwei, Jobs, Nooyi, Zuckerberg and Winfrey can give dramatic pause to a conversation and pique collegial interest. But their mere mention can also throw a name dropper under the credibility bus quicker than they can say "My cousin was college roommates with J.K. Rowling's agent's sister.""

The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month.

This autumn more than a million students are going to take part in an experiment that could re-invent the landscape of higher education.

"We are excited to announce the launch of the Open Education Alliance today. The purpose of this alliance is to provide students worldwide with the relevant and necessary skills and knowledge to pursue successful careers in technology. This alliance consists of leading technology companies who are stepping up to define the education requirements for the workforce of the 21st Century. And it includes educational institutions who provide pathways and assessment that will empower students to learn the skills required for success in the workforce."