Major textbook publishers, including McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Kaplan, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, have completed a deal with software company ScrollMotion Inc. to prepare their textbook offerings for digital outlets like the iPad. Textbook publishers, having seen the impact of technology and the internet on the newspaper industry, are desperately trying to stay ahead of the technology curve and viable well into the 21st century. Rik Kranenburg, group president of higher eduction at McGraw-Hill had this to say: “Nobody knows what device will take off, or which ‘killer app’ will drive student adaptations. Today they aren’t reading e-textbooks on their laptops. But ahead we see all kinds of new instruction materials.” The Wall Street Jounal, citing a report by research firm Compass Intelligence, predicts technology spending among educational institutions will increase $14.3 billion over a five year period (tracked from 2008 to 2013); a figure publishing companies clearly are not going to ignore. Check out the WSJ article for all the details.

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An Ivy League degree may get you a job as an investment banker or VC, but it won’t increase your odds of becoming a successful entrepreneur.

So you couldn’t get into Stanford, Berkeley or Harvard, huh? Don’t sweat it. You can still make it big. Some people might believe that an Ivy League education provides a huge advantage in entrepreneurship. But after researching this over and over again, I’ve found no such correlation. To the contrary, it seems that those who are born without the silver spoons in their mouths are more motivated to succeed. And those who aren’t members of elite alum societies develop the skills needed to hustle in the rough and tough business world. The Ivy-Leaguers may be able to get their buddies from Sequoia and Kleiner to return emails, but they aren’t going to be any more successful at building companies.

With my affiliations at three of the greatest universities in the world (Harvard, Berkeley, and Duke), I know I’m going to take a lot of flak for this piece. (Yes, I know that Berkeley and Duke aren’t Ivy League — but they are in the “elite” category). It’s not that I haven’t been trying to find the good news. I’ve done three big research projects on entrepreneurship. Each of these reached the same conclusion about education and entrepreneurship: What makes entrepreneurs successful is the education, not the school. It’s the same in India and China. India’s IITs and China’s Fudan University (their “Ivy League” schools) don’t hold any monopoly on graduating tech stars.

In the first research project, we looked at the background of 317 immigrants who started tech companies. We were surprised to learn that Delhi University graduated twice as many Silicon Valley company founders as did IIT Delhi. And that both Osmania and Bombay University trumped nearly all of the IITs. China’s Tianjin University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University graduated more founders than Fudan or Tsinghua.

These were immigrants, and we weren’t sure if it would be the same with American schools. So we looked into the educational background of American tech company founders. We found that the 628 U.S.-born tech founders we surveyed received their education from 287 unique universities. Almost every major U.S. university was represented. The top ten institutions in this group accounted for only 19 percent of the entire sample. In other words, 81% of the tech company founders came from “regular” schools. To make my colleagues at Harvard feel better (and to keep my job), I’ll acknowledge that the Ivies represented 8% of the sample even though those schools only graduate 1.6% of American students.

Then we broadened our research and looked into the backgrounds of the founders of 549 successful businesses across a set of high-growth industries. The proportion of Ivy-Leaguers was even smaller (about 6% of the sample). We also found that MBA’s tended to start companies sooner after graduation (13 years) than bachelors degree holders (17 years). And both these groups were quicker to the startups than PhD’s – who typically waited 21 years from the time they graduated to start their ventures. That’s right, tech company founders aren’t spring chickens. Also, we found that Computer Science/IT grads were faster than MBA’s (13 years vs. 15 yrs) and the applied science majors (20 years).

The most interesting findings however were the difference between those who had college degrees and those who never even got a sheepskin. The average sales revenue of all startups in one of our samples was around $5.7 million, and these companies employed an average of forty-two workers. Startups established by tech founders with Ivy League degrees had average sales and employment of $6.7 million and fifty-five workers, respectively. The success of these two groups markedly contrasted with startups established by tech founders with only a high school degree. Those founders had average revenues and employees of $2.2 million and eighteen, respectively. (Sorry, Bill and Steve). In other words, it didn’t matter so much if you graduated from an Ivy. What made the greatest difference was having a higher degree.

Company founders also value their education. In a paper which the Kauffman Foundation will release on Nov 17 (during Global Entrepreneurship Week), we report that 70.3% said their university education was important. Ivy League graduates valued their education even more, with 85.7% indicating this was important. Surprisingly only 18.8% believed that university or alumni networks were important. Of the Ivy graduates, 28.6% ranked these networks as important.

To be fair, an Ivy League education does provide other advantages. An Ivy degree makes it much easier to become an investment banker at Goldman Sachs (is that a positive these days?), a venture capitalist (most are elite school grads) or a powerful attorney. It probably makes it easier to become a professor, as well. And, as my research shows, it may confer a slight advantage to entrepreneurs. But not enough of an advantage to make any real difference in the equation. So, Mom and Dad, save your dollars. High school juniors, save your tears. Ivy Leaguers, check your ego at the door. What makes you good is what and how you learn, not the name on your framed diploma.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Some of the most important business lessons are learned in the most unlikely ways. At Ardent I learned many of them with a sharp smack on the side of the head from a brilliant, but abusive, boss. Not a process I recommend, but one in which the lessons stuck for a lifetime.

Ardent was my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.) It would be the company where I actually earned the title.

By the time I joined, I thought I was an experienced marketer, but I’ll never forget my first real lesson in what it meant to understand customers and product/market fit.

We were sitting in our conference room in our first “system-planning meeting,”  trying to define the specifications of our new supercomputer and make the trade-offs between what was possible to build, and what customers in this new market would actually want and need. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. I was pleased with myself that not only did I understand the issues, but I also had an opinion about what we should build.

All of a sudden I decided that I hadn’t heard the sound of my own voice in a while so I piped up:  “I think our customers will want 24-bits of double-buffered graphics.”

Silence descended across the conference table. The CEO turned to me and asked, “What did you say?” Thinking he was impressed with my mastery of the subject as well as my brilliant observation, I repeated myself and embellished my initial observation with all the additional reasons why I thought our customers would want this feature. I was about to get an education that would last a lifetime.

Picture the scene: The entire company (all 15 of us) is present. For this startup, we had assembled some of the best and brightest hardware and software engineers in the computer industry. My boss, the CEO, had just come from a string of successes at Convergent Technologies, Intel and Digital Equipment, names that at that time carried a lot of weight.

Some of us had worked together in previous companies; some of us had just started working together for the first time.  I thought I was bright, aggressive and could do no wrong as a marketer. I loved my job and I was convinced I was God’s gift to marketing.

Now in a voice so quiet it could be barely heard across the conference table our CEO turns to me and says, “That’s what I thought you said. I just wanted to make sure I heard it correctly.”  It was the last sentence I heard before my career trajectory as a marketer was permanently changed.

At the top of his lungs he screamed, “You don’t know a damn thing about what these customers need! You’ve never talked to anyone in this market, you don’t know who they are, you don’t know what they need, and you have no right to speak in any of these planning meetings.”

I was mortified with the dressing down in front of my friends as well as new employees I barely knew. Later my friends told me my face went pale.

He continued yelling, “We have a technical team assembled in this room that has more knowledge of scientific customers and scientific computers than any other startup has ever had. They’ve been talking to these customers since before you were born, and they have a right to have an opinion. You are a disgrace to the marketing profession and have made a fool of yourself and will continue to do so every time you open your mouth. Get out of this conference room, get out of this building and get out of my company; you are wasting all of our time.”

I was stunned by the verbal onslaught. At that moment I felt so small I could have walked out of a room underneath the crack in a closed door.

The shock quickly wore off as I processed the gist of what he told me. He was right.  I personally didn’t have any facts, and if we were counting opinions, there were a bunch more educated opinions in that room than I had. All I had been doing was filling the air with marketing noises.

I was convinced that I had just been humiliatingly fired – 90 days into our new company.

As I got up to leave the room, the CEO said, “I want you out of the building talking to customers; find out who they are, how they work, and what we need to do to sell them lots of these new computers.” Motioning to our VP of Sales, he ordered: “Go with him and get him in front of customers, and both of you don’t come back until you can tell us something we don’t know.”

And he was smiling.

My career as marketer had just begun.

Photo by Zach Klein via Flickr

A lot of non-French speakers assume that perfume means scent for women. This is a common misconception, in reality “parfum” literally means “fragrance.” “Cologne” was adapted to mean the male version, but it originated as a lighter parfum scent from the city of Koln. Regardless, even with these misconceptions, men want to know how to properly put fragrances on.

Firstly, what needs to be understood is there is no right, wrong or perfect fragrance for you. It’s all relative, basically if you enjoy the scent from the bottle and once on your skin it meshes well (sometimes you’ll notice certain fragrances appear differently depending on the person wearing it).

Secondly, excessive amounts of spray will not make the fragrance smell better or last longer. Fragrances differ in how long they last and by engulfing yourself in the scent all you’ll manage is aggravating those around you. The smell itself may leave after 10 minutes, but the ten which you subject your surroundings to endure will be quite hard to tolerate, even if the scent is fantastic.

Once you know which fragrance you wish to wear, spray at the tops of your forearms (not the wrists as commonly shown that women do), spray either side of your neck just beneath your ear (under the corners of the jaw) and one spray inside your t-shirt or shirt and down your back. Don’t spray in excess around your neck/hair/face.