Mentoring Both Start-Ups and Students in Innovation and Strategy

Deb Mills-Scofield is a business consultant, venture capitalist and mentor. Additionally, she’s a fan of lobster. For part of the year, she lives in a small town on the Maine coast, where she often buys lobster at the local grocery. In the store one day, she and her daughter spotted “something blue” in the crowded live-lobster tank. It was a rare blue lobster. Only one in every two to three million lobsters wears this hue. Mills-Scofield purchased the blue anomaly for less than $10. She drove it to the dock, freed its claws and released it into the wild. Her tale’s moral is, “When you find a blue lobster, nurture it, support it and set it free.”

Figuratively, <...