Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education

I'm attending the Always On Innovation Summit at Stanford this week. Others are here on Blogger Passes. Thought I would share notes from the one session on innovation

Notes from a session on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education with Professors Tom Byers and Bob Sutton of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. One of my favorite topics and perhaps the best session at the event.

Tom Byers:

Can entrepreneurship (defined as a process, a way of leading and managing, a way of siezing opportunity without regard to available resources. More than a set of characteristics.

Polled the audience on when they went to school. Odds are, I'm one of a handful to have studied entrepreneurship.

Most technology schools teach entrepreneurship now. Teaching it aids tech transfer. Leading schools prompt competitive response to offer it by other schools. At Stanford 40 courses, 3k students, 25% MBA students, most of the rest are engineers. Its about skill development, turning people into leaders. Real-time decision making skills, comfort with change, basic fields like selling and evangelism. They share their curriculm (shows Educator's Corner).

Bob Sutton, author of Weird Ideas That Work:

Like Physicians who study bloodletting in the 16th century, over focus on success stories. The AO 100 isn't what its about. Successes and failures share predictable plot lines (before and after with Enron). People worship CEOs, the degrees in which CEOs don't matter is the biggest CEOs matter at the beginning, and the very end of a company, the team is more important. CEO worship is irrational..

In the valley, on average, you are going to fail. Entrepreneurship is a Ponzi scheme, with the one that succeeds in a portfolio is held up by VCs, saying "this could be you." Students need to know these risks. 1:10 odds.

Companies take a bunch of old ideas, tweak them slightly and boom they Take elements that are proven and can be done quickly. iPod done in 8 months, because aside from ID and interface, everything else was off the shelf. iPod wasn't a radical innovation, optimized what they were good at and otherwise went with other's stuff.

One of the best ways to increase your success rate is to lie to others about the odds of success. Certain delisuional quality (Steve Jobs, Coppola). Confidence and irrationality as key to success. Blind faith towards a goal. Makes the Lemmings run faster to the sea.

Technology brokering, an IDEO approach.

I asked: Does the valley still reward failure? Valley still rewards failure, better than anywhere else (save maybe Shanghai). Rewards failure, but only if entreprenuers go through it gracefully.

Kathy Eisenhardt, success of teams that worked together before.

Get it out, fail and fail faster.

I posted the chat transcript from during the session (most of it).

Posted by rossmayfield, July 15, 2004 03:31 PM | | TrackBack