Spend a few days in the company of entrepreneurs, or devote a solid 12 hours to listening to educators and self-made businesspeople talk about ways to encourage entrepreneurship, and you’ll come away with a few conclusions. That’s what happened to me last week after spending three days in Orlando: the first two spent at a retreat for young entrepreneurs and the third at a summit exploring the future of entrepreneurship education.

Rather than write a lengthy tome on any single topic discussed last week, I’m opting for a different approach (an impending flight back to New York and a looming deadline might have something to do with this). And since this is 2011, I offer not 10 but 11 lessons about the state of entrepreneurship today.

1. The biggest single takeaway from Friday’s marathon summit—organized by the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour and held at the University of Central Florida—is that educators at big and small institutions across the country say their schools are finally tailoring programs to teach about entrepreneurship. That’s definitely a solid development, since business programs traditionally deal with economic theory, supply and demand, and big finance. But just saying your university is adding entrepreneurship courses to a curriculum isn’t enough. Schools need to ensure they’re not just teaching the theory of entrepreneurship, but that they’re developing programs that actually let students create and develop new companies. Plus, they need to recognize that it’s not just business students who can benefit from these courses: would-be engineers, artists, doctors, journalists, and many more would be eager to create their own companies.

2. Following President Barack Obama’s launch of the Startup America program to encourage and support entrepreneurs, the administration sent representatives to Orlando to send the message “we’re here to help.” No one in the audience was critical of this effort. Far from it. The general consensus was it was about time Washington went beyond outreach to corporations and traditional small businesses. But this doesn’t mean the entrepreneurs were pro-government. One very successful creator of a multimillion-dollar company had a wild idea: eliminate as many government functions as possible and turn those tasks over to entrepreneurs.

3. Beyond what the feds and universities are doing, new resources for entrepreneurs are being created seemingly every day. There are intense and exclusive programs like Y Combinator and 500 Startups that will offer guidance, training, and funding for select companies in exchange for equity in companies. There are branded programs by American Express, Bank of America, Cisco Systems, and more to aid entrepreneurs. And there are incubators cropping up all over the country to lend a hand. To find these, you need to do two things: Be creative in looking for them (use online searches with various key words), and don’t get discouraged if you get turned down.

4. The high-tech startups get all the glory, but they only account for a minimal number of startups. Scott Gerber, the founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council who has a few businesses in the works, emphasizes this point and says 99 percent of all startup efforts are inherently non-tech. The YEC's membership is filled with this type of business owner; people like Adam Witty, who founded and leads the Advantage Media Group, a company rooted in one of the oldest pursuits: publishing. Witty's company mixes the old, putting out books and magazines, with the new through ebooks and multimedia production. Gerber, who briefed the summit on results of a survey of young entrepreneurs, also made clear to include more traditional small-business enterprises like dry cleaners in his call for more entrepreneurship.

5. When someone talks about being a “social entrepreneur,” he’s not talking about running another network like Facebook or LinkedIn. He’s referring to creating a company that either has a noble purpose or takes a creative approach to funding charitable operations. Robert Nicholson is an example of the first. The Ohio native is co-owner and operator of two companies that aid developmentally disabled adults. His companies are all about improving his communities. Ryan Allis is an example of the second. The founder of iContact, an email marketing company for small businesses, Allis mandates that 1 percent of his company's payroll, 1 percent of equity, 1 percent of product, and 1 percent of employee time goes to supporting nonprofit organizations in North Carolina, where iContact is based.

6. In the example above, notice I used the pronoun “he.” That wasn’t on accident. Men significantly outnumber women in the entrepreneurial ranks, a fact that’s not lost on either gender. During a session Friday on young entrepreneurs, only one of the seven business owners on stage was a woman. Caryn Shick, president and CEO of Opportunity Analysts, suggested one reason for this dearth of women creating their own businesses might have something to do with an aversion to risk, a desire to be more practical or safe with career choices.