Entrepreneurship education has become an increasingly important aspect of the entrepreneurial endeavour, especially in science and engineering. While the US graduate education system is the envy of other developed countries around the world, with independent-minded graduate students and post-doctoral fellows advancing the frontiers of engineering, physical and life sciences, that system has done little to help researchers evaluate, which ideas and discoveries have commercial potential.
Providing scientists and engineers with useful entrepreneurial skills will accelerate the translation of ideas from lab to product to enterprise. The authors are developing an innovative method for teaching scientists and engineers how to develop and harness the value of their discoveries by using digital-media-based collaborative support to overcome the various obstacles that arise in launching technological startup companies.
Entrepreneurship education is on the rise The value of entrepreneurship has long been recognised at the national level. Entrepreneurs were first noted in the early 1940s as important economic drivers by scholar Joseph Schumpeter, who identified them as disrupters who brought change and innovation to new products and/or methods of production. By 1980s, entrepreneurial companies like Microsoft began to change the world with new ideas and business innovations. The forces of globalisation continue to make the world economy even more entrepreneurial in the 21st century. In step with those developments, the past few years have witnessed dramatic growth in entrepreneurship educational activities around the world. That growth can be attributed to a confluence of numerous economic, demographic and societal factors that have boosted interest in entrepreneurial career pursuits. With the elimination of mandatory retirement and social security penalties over the past several decades, Americans have elected to work past, sometimes well past, the typical retirement age of 65. Independently, the wealth-eroding effect of the recent economic downturn has only exacerbated that situation, forcing many, who might have considered retiring, either to remain in the work force or to embark on an entrepreneurial business venture in their senior years.
The recent recession has also affected many workers in mid-career, who have been displaced by substantial (and likely permanent) job losses in the business, finance, commerce and industrial sectors. With few options for gainful employment, many are retraining themselves for more entrepreneurial pursuits. Those same structural changes in the United States and global economies have also profoundly changed the employment picture for today’s youngest workers, causing interest in entrepreneurial careers within that age cohort to skyrocket.
Discovery + Business Plan = Success? Notwithstanding those global economic forces, entrepreneurship in science and engineering – especially in the energy, biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical device, nanotechnology and life sciences sectors – continues to experience record growth. And although the entrepreneurial spirit has flourished in America, bringing great prosperity and enhancing the common good, the gap between basic research and product development/commercialisation remains wide and deep. Educational efforts to bridge that gap have generally been unsuccessful. In a study of the various rankings of entrepreneurship programs, Kher et al, found that just under half of the 160 programs that appear on one of the rankings systems (US News and World Report, BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur, Media, Fortune Magazine) offer courses in undergraduate engineering. Thus, the naive notion persists among many scientists and engineers that an exciting discovery or breakthrough research finding can simply be bundled with a standard business plan and the result will automatically create a successful venture. Funding invention and innovation alone is insufficient. Even the most well-funded efforts to drive entrepreneurship around discovery alone have failed. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen created Interval Research in 1992 to “map out the concepts and create the technology that will be important in the future.” But the venture ceased after spending $100 million with no tangible successes. In 2000, Microsoft’s former Chief Technology Officer, Nathan Myhrvold, created Intellectual Ventures around the concept of “invention capital” to acquire and license new technologies. Even after filing nearly 1,000 patent applications and several lawsuits, Intellectual Ventures boasts no significant technology success story. Most experienced entrepreneurs understand that the risks in launching a startup are best managed by recognising and minimising specific risk factors, the most common being financial, intellectual property, scientific/technological, operational, market, and regulatory risk. However, there are countless obstacles that may surface unexpectedly in the evolution of a new venture. Discovery-based firms face unpredictable risks
No academic course can prepare entrepreneurs for unexpected challenges; one is forced to “learn on the fly.” Simply glancing at the IPO prospectuses of young technology companies suggests the range of things that can go wrong. These risks highlight the fact that entrepreneurs moving ideas from the lab to the marketplace need to understand and plan for competitive responses, people-oriented issues, legal situations and cash flow dilemmas.
A new ‘Practice and Participation’ platform: Based on my teaching experience as well as ‘real world’ examples from my consulting practice I believe that peer-learning can accelerate the acquisition of valuable entrepreneurial skills. Besides benefiting from “on the job” experience, entrepreneurs can better master the challenges of the business world using realistic case studies enhanced with user-generated analysis and commentary enabled by multimedia and social networking capabilities.
Today’s ‘generation-Y’ or ‘millennial’ students and young professionals use online communities and social networks to obtain and share information. Leveraging this online participatory culture results in a new educational paradigm framed around the classic findings of the renowned American educator, John Dewey. It was Dewey who established the central link between learning and knowing, and showed that each individual’s educational development evolved via experiential learning in the transition from the classroom to the real world. David Kolb took Dewey’s theories a step further in the 1980s by creating a model with four components: (i) Concrete experience, (ii) Observation and reflection, (iii) The formation of abstract concepts, and (iv) Testing in new situations. Incorporating those components into a technology platform can enables the next generation of entrepreneurs, scientific leaders, and corporate managers to hone their skills at creating, developing, and commercialising the technologies of the future.
The core of successful case studies features: 1) A focus on a central business question, or key strategic issue; 2) A classroom setting to provide an open forum for presenting multiple perspectives and opinions; 3) A stringent requirement for student preparation.
Experience has shown that the greater the number of students who have read the case – and the longer they have spent thinking about the core question – the livelier and more diverse the spectrum of input and feedback generated by the class. Usually, just “reading” a case in isolation or discussing it with 1-2 individuals is much less rewarding than obtaining collective feedback from a diverse group that has also devoted time and thought to the case. Moreover, no collaborative or team-building skills are developed during the process of “self-study” case analysis. No “what if…” scenarios or “what would you do?” queries are generated that trigger the evaluation of multiple outcomes and consequences, with assigned probabilities and likelihoods. The greater the number of assessments, the more reliable the assigned outcome probabilities. Social media and social networking sites on the Internet can provide the tools for such polling by providing the modern entrepreneurship student with access to a large cohort of individuals. By working together, such cohorts can rapidly and efficiently develop case assessment and risk-minimisation probabilities. To be successful in digital-media-based pedagogy, case studies need to meet several criteria. The best case studies should offer variety – spanning several disciplines in the physical and life sciences as well as engineering – and raise multifaceted issues or pose multidimensional questions, with opportunities for discussion and collaboration from several different backgrounds and vantage points. The best case studies also evolve with user feedback and other networking or collaboration, thus revealing hidden intricacies and nuances that boost their ultimate educational value.
Gen Y is online, mobile and rich-media oriented: A 2008 study released by the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School found that the growth of social networking communities such as Facebook opened “a range of opportunities for social connection, involvement and communication that could not have been anticipated even five years ago.” The report also notes that social networking sites are “demonstrating that opportunities to be involved in common projects and idea sharing about any subject we choose and with people anywhere on Earth is possible and practical.” While there remains substantial amounts of “noise” in cyberspace, the Annenberg study also found that the Internet is “perceived by users to be a more important source of information for them – this over all other principal media, including television, radio, newspapers, and books.” Generation Y users, in particular, have most embraced this new medium. In their 2007 book, Connecting to the Next Generation: What Higher Education Professionals Need to Know About Today’s Students, Junco and Mastrodicasa conducted research on over 7,700 college students, a group having the highest rate of technology usage of any generation. Within this cohort, 97% own computers, 94% own cell phones, 76% of the group use instant messaging (with “typical” users logging 35 hours per week), 28% have a blog, and 69% had a Facebook account. Clearly, students and young professionals today not only understand how to use these technologies, but they also expect them to be integrated into their academic, personal and career activities.
Merging entrepreneurship and digital media: Leading these major transformations into digital media usage, one of us (DHS) in the early 1990s began capturing video interviews with business experts and entrepreneurs to better understand the professional challenges they faced. The interviews served two important pedagogical purposes. First, the “real world” wisdom of practicing entrepreneurs could be chronicled and stored permanently in a database repository. Second, the video content could be broken into smaller segments and integrated into classroom lecture material to better engage the interest of undergraduate students.
To enhance the latter purpose, each interview was transcribed and segmented into brief “clips.” Segments were then keyworded, aggregated and loaded to a web-based repository where they could be accessed more conveniently. The eClips website was launched in 2003 – two years before the founding of YouTube! – and became the foundation of a collection that has grown to about 15,000 clips used by educators at over 1,200 universities in 80 countries. By integrating that technology at Prendismo with advances in social networking and digital media, we believe the sophistication and pedagogical value of case studies used in entrepreneurship education will be significantly enhanced.
Science-based startups thrive: Our experience has shown that sharing case studies of technology-based startups online in the rich decision-making environment of social media enhances their intellectual content and pedagogical value, in essence by creating a “Wiki” effect in online entrepreneurial education. As with the initial case questions/issues, the “takeaways” or “lessons learned,” become multi-dimensional, delivering real-world lessons and practical value to participants from several professional or personal perspectives. Finally the breadth of sharing makes case studies relevant to users in a broad range of user venues, whether in an individual’s office or study, an academic classroom, a small startup company, a technology transfer organisation, or a large industrial corporation.
