Eduardo Marty is the Founder of Junior Achievement Argentina, an educational outreach program. Students in JA are taught how to prepare a business plan and raise funds. Approximately 50,000 students per year across Argentina participate. Marty has also held academic posts as professor at the University Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala, and the University of Buenos Aires. He was the host of Buenos Aires’s major television talk show Boom—Politics and Economics. We met with Mr. Marty in Buenos Aires to talk about his business education programs for young people and the state of entrepreneurship in South America.

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Kaizen: Where did you grow up in Argentina?

Marty: In Buenos Aires. I went to elementary and high school here and the University too.

Kaizen: Before university, what was your education like?

Marty: Well, I went to school called National Buenos Aires. That’s the oldest high school in Buenos Aires, created in 1770. It’s a public school, but it’s a very prestigious one. It was the first school in Buenos Aires. To enter, you need to pass a very tough test once you finish elementary school. From five students submitting and applying—they accept just one. Our education is divided into elementary school and then secondary school. When I was in sixth grade I tried to pass the exam and I did it, so I was one year younger than the rest.

The Jewish community attends that school a lot. It is a very intellectual community here in Buenos Aires. By the way, you know that after New York Buenos Aires has the second largest Jewish community in the hemisphere.

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Popular Science has a great, in-depth feature on the best innovations of 2010. The feature lists 100 innovations from various categories, including auto tech, computing, gadgets, green tech, and home entertainment, as well as the grand awards for the most innovative from each category. There are also interesting profiles of several innovators.

Check out the feature on Popular Science.

Microsoft was working on e-books and tablet PCs a decade ago. So why did it never get around to releasing them? Why, with so many intelligent and talented employees, is it falling behind Apple in innovation? Dick Brass, who was a Microsoft vice president for seven years, explains how Microsoft’s lack of systems that support innovation lead to risk-avoidance and internal struggles that crush great ideas before they ever make it into the marketplace.

Read the article at the New York Times.

Thomas L. Friedman writes in a recent New York Times article that President Obama should be focusing on inspiring America’s youth to become entrepreneurial rather than playing the blame game with bankers. By contrast, Friedman praises Kaizen interviewee Steve Mariotti’s NFTE as an example of an organization doing excellent work with young entrepreneurs.

Read the full article here.

“What makes visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Ebay’s Pierre Omidyar and Meg Whitman, and P&G’s A.G. Lafley tick?”

Read this article at Harvard Business Review to find out.

Also of interest: Harvard Business Review’s Creativity at Work package.

An interesting paper published this summer by Vivek Wadhwa et al.: “Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family Background and Motivation.”

The paper’s abstract:

“Entrepreneurs are among the most celebrated people in our culture. Celebrity entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, often grace the covers of prominent publications. These company founders and innovators fuel economic growth and give the nation its competitive edge.

“However, very little is known today about the backgrounds, life histories, motivations and beliefs of these entrepreneurs. So myths and stereotypes prevail. The commonly held belief is that entrepreneurs are young, lightly-educated, childless unmarried workaholics. They are perceived to come from rich families and graduate from elite colleges.

“But is this true?

“This research answers some of these questions. This is based on a survey of 549 company founders in 12 high-growth industries.

“It finds that most founders came from middle-class or upper-lower-class backgrounds, are well-educated and married with children. The strongest motivation for starting a company was to ‘build wealth.’ Other popular motivators included capitalizing on a business idea; the appeal of a startup culture; a desire to own a company; and a lack of interest in working for someone else.”

Here’s the link to the paper at the Social Science Research Network.