Editor's note: Practically every week, a media organization throws an event or a conference built around doing business in new and creative ways. These gatherings certainly can be helpful and illuminating, but they can be tough to break away for, too pricey, or invitation-only. Portfolio.com's editors and writers drop into several throughout the year, and we're bringing you highlights. Today's event: The Future of Entrepreneurship Education Summit.

About two blocks away from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington is the main tent encampment for Occupy D.C. Like in other cities, it's filled with disenfranchised people concerned that corporate America is amassing too much wealth in the hands of just a few people, and who are angry that unemployment rates remain too high, especially for younger Americans.

But here, inside the Chamber—the main lobbying force on behalf of those corporations the Occupy protestors loathe—a very different discussion is taking place. A collection of educators, government officials, and entrepreneurs have gathered as part of a three-day Future of Entrepreneurship Education Summit. The goal of the summit—organized by Empact, a New York-based media and education company dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship—is to create an "entrepreneurship stimulus plan."

Today is the main day of the summit, and the high point has been a series of keynote speeches in the morning. Here are highlights:

Ted Leonsis: Chairman, CEO, and majority owner of Monumental Sports and Entertainment, and a former president of AOL.

"I always believe that we should follow the money," said Leonsis, as he described a way companies can increase job creation, reward shareholders, and support startups. But to be effective, the federal government is going to have to bend on a key issue, and corporations are going to have to agree to spend.

That issue for the government: Allow U.S. companies to bring back an estimated $1.4 trillion in profits they have sitting in foreign banks because they don't want to pay 35-percent taxes on those repatriated profits. Leonsis didn't say outright that the entire tax should be waived (a bipartisan bill introduced in Congress suggests that they be taxed at as little as 5.25 percent), but he said keeping the tax at 35 percent only encourages companies to invest in other countries rather than the United States.

And that call to action for companies: Take the $1.9 trillion they're sitting on in safe accounts that are earning a paltry 1 percent in interest and be bold. Companies should be rewarded for investing at home. They should take this more than $3 trillion that they've got on hand and divide it up in equal parts of giving back to investors, investing in infrastructure and hiring people, putting money into startups and venture funds, and keeping a rainy-day fund.

“Our birthright of being entrepreneurial, because we are a startup nation, is in jeopardy,” said Leonsis, an early investor in the daily deal company Groupon, back when it only had four employees. He talked about companies "investing wisely and using the cash we already have on hand to do it…. It's a deep subject. The money is there. It's up to us to do something now."

Jeff Sandefer: Principal in Sandefer Capital Partners, which holds more than $1 billion in energy investments, and founder of the Acton School of Business, which offers a one-year MBA program in entrepreneurship.

Now that he's built an MBA program for entrepreneurs, Sandefer has another project: getting kids to learn about creating their own businesses. "A tsunami of change is coming in education," said Sandefer, who has no appetite for traditional elementary and secondary teaching methods—a system he described as assembly-line education built around the concept of "we talk, you listen."

Instead, Sandefer would like to see more experiments with charter schools and home schooling that are built around the concept of "learning to be" rather than "learning to know."

He laid out an interesting presentation called My Entrepreneurial Journey that borrowed concepts learned from superheroes, Google, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Boy Scouts. Running through it all was a constant challenge to take stock of your life every 10 years, to periodically question whether you're on the right path.

Sandefer was asked how he could implement and scale this disruptive innovation without losing the support of the "old guard."

"I don't want to alienate the old system, but I don't want to spend a lot of time in trying to change their minds because I don't think it would be that effect," Sandefer said, prefacing that remark by saying he would "suck all the marrow and energy out of the old system and let it collapse."

Naveen Jain: Founder of the companies Moon Express, Intelius, and InfoSpace.

At every conference for entrepreneurs, a few messages get repeated over and over. It's necessary for entrepreneurs to think of solutions to problems. It's good to fail, as long as you learn from those failures. It's great to shoot to build the next billion-dollar company, but it's success will depend not on the idea but on the execution.

Jain delivered all of those messages with the fervor of a motivational speaker, as he encouraged educators to take the lessons of entrepreneurship to younger audiences. For example, Girl Scouts on their cookie campaigns were entrepreneurs and should be treated as such. "You're not selling a cookie, you're selling a dream," he said.

But Jain's best line was in response to a question about how to teach entrepreneurship in Latin America. This is where he brought up the idea of failure, primarily of creating a culture that respects failure.

It's all about "creating that culture in a family, creating that culture in a community, creating that culture where someone is," Jain said. "It's like sex. You should enjoy the process and not worry about the end goal."