Is Yale’s effort to build-out an infrastructure that supports, promotes and encourages student-led innovation and entrepreneurship a signal that it is transitioning to a more strategic stance in how students are being prepared as 21^st century knowledge workers for the global knowledge economy?   My hypothesis is that stiffer competition, from its peer group Harvard, Stanford and MIT, to attract top students requires Yale to adopt modern approaches, including experiential learning, to preparing students to be 21^st century knowledge workers.  The ethnography that I am writing examines how Yale students use the university’s intellectual, physical and financial resources to facilitate their preparation as 21^st century knowledge workers.  Specifically it will analyze how students access and engage with the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”) and the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (“YEI”).  These are the predominant gateways through which students access university resources relating to student-led innovation and entrepreneurship.  Because these two organizations were founded to give students opportunities for experiential learning, they are manifestations of Yale’s transition to a more strategic stance in how students are being prepared to join the 21^st century global workforce.

The YEI approach to student-led innovation and entrepreneurship has been analogized, by an informant, to using a funnel to tease out the most promising prospects.  At the very top is conversation, at the bottom is raising capital for almost formed start-ups.  As YEI has been built out it now offers pedagogy and mentorship.  YEI, nonetheless was started to capture ventures at the bottom of the funnel, stated my informant.  This worldview could be characterized as “command and control” because the methods, processes and prevailing attitude that it encompasses.  Under such a worldview university administrators at YEI, rather than students or faculty, drive the entrepreneurial agenda.

This regime is a stark contrast to the regime at CEID.  The CEID worldview is summarized in the statement by a staff member in response to the question:  What is the role of the CEID in the innovation and entrepreneurship process at Yale? “CEID is a place where we help people unlock a new threshold of knowledge,” was his profound answer.  CEID is a centerpiece of experiential learning for students interested in making physical things.  It is an academic maker space where all members of the Yale community including students and faculty can ideate, design, prototype and manufacture all sorts of physical things.

The infrastructure and willingness to sponsor and promote student-led entrepreneurial activities would not be possible without the commercialization of faculty innovations and inventions through the Office of Cooperative Research (“OCR”).  YEI and CEID have the attributes of organizations that manage activities related to bringing students’ experiences and learning closer to the knowledge economy.  An illustration of the different yet complementary approaches that CEID and YEI have taken to facilitating student-led innovation and entrepreneurship is embodied in the development of 109 Design, a student-led venture that has gone from ideation during the CEID Summer Fellowship Program to patentable technology with the help of OCR to acceptance as a participant in the 2014 YEI Summer Fellowship Program.

CEID’s inaugural Summer Fellowship in 2013 was more about providing access to equipment, materials, and project mentoring to enable student teams to work on proof of concept than attempting to create start-ups.  The 109 Design team had such a successful time in developing an early prototype of a bio-medical device that they continued to work on their project during the academic year: they honed their bio-medical device and working with a physician at the Yale-New Haven Hospital the device is entering the medical trial phase.

YEI’s Summer Fellowship Program is a 10-week start-up boot camp for student-led ventures.  From a pool of applicants YEI selects what it deems to be the 10 most promising ideas.  This summer incubator is an intensive experience that enables a team to go from ideation to viable start-up venture.  The participants are immersed in the principles of the Lean Start-up movement.  This methodology “favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional ‘big design up front’ development,” wrote Steve Blank, one of principal architects of this movement.

The complementary manner in which CEID and YEI are collaborating will allow 109 Design over the course of two summers to work through the implied phases associated with Steve Blank’s definition of a start-up: a start-up is a temporary organization designed for the purpose of searching for a business model that is both scalable and sustainable.  During the summer of 2013 and the 2013-2014 academic year, 109 Design tested and proved certain hypotheses aligned with their technology.  During the summer of 2014 under the auspices of YEI, the team will work on discovering the appropriate scalable and sustainable business model.

What would be the implications of YEI and CEID working together to replicate the experience of the 109 Design team?