The Darden School (UVA’s MBA and graduate business program) announced today the opening of a new building and innovation lab that will provide “experiential, team-based and collaborative learning opportunities, such as a design-based studio where students can transform concepts and ideas into physical prototypes.” The grand opening event will be March 19th and will include remarks by New York Times bestselling-author Daniel Pink.

From the website announcement:

“Darden’s new i.Lab is a physical manifestation of leading scholarship on innovation that has emerged from the Batten Institute and the Darden School over the past several years,” said Elizabeth O’Halloran, Managing Director, Batten Institute

Anyone out there considering quitting their job and starting a company? Here’s a great video clip of Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon.com) explaining his decision to leave a great job on Wall Street and place a bet on “this new internet thing”. He describes creating a “Regret Minimization Framework” which sounds a lot like this quote from President Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910