This post is the 50^th on this site. I want to express my deep appreciation to everyone who has ever taken the time to read a post.  In addition, I want to thank everyone who has ever sent me an e-mail commenting on a specific post or my approach to a specific topic. All of your comments and support have made this a more thoughtful and enjoyable project.

“I think you are hitting a really deep and rich vein in looking at how a traditional liberal arts education fits into innovation. This is the part that is most specific to Yale because we are as good as anyone in the arts and humanities.” This is an excerpt from an e-mail that I received regarding last week’s post “The Wide Toolbox.” It captures what is unique about how a cohort of Yale students prepare themselves to be 21^st century knowledge workers through integrating traditional liberal arts with applied knowledge in the form of innovation and entrepreneurship. This emerging pedagogical model informs the environment in which my ethnographic research has been conducted. Here is an overview of the results thus far.

Central question:  What does it mean to prepare to be a 21st century knowledge worker?

Hypothesis:  Yale’s change to a more pragmatic stance towards the production and use of knowledge was foundational for the build-out of the intellectual and physical infra-structure that facilitates student-led innovation and entrepreneurship.

Approach:  This hypothesis has been investigated though the ethnographic lens of a cohort of students who access and use student-orientated infra-structure that promotes, supports and fosters student-led innovation and entrepreneurship.

Significance:  At the individual level, this research demonstrates how a traditional liberal arts education fits into innovation and entrepreneurship. Moreover, students can garner a wide toolbox of skills that empowers them to innovate for the knowledge economy, and if they chose, create their own jobs and control the intellectual capital and the intellectual property. The wide toolbox metaphor conceptualizes the convergence of liberal arts based theoretical knowledge and applied knowledge gained from making things. And at the institutional level, this research demonstrates how a 300 year-old global educational institution has adapted its research and teaching mission to integrate with the 21^st century knowledge economy. This has been achieved through the incorporation of market-like behaviors, as well as a market ethos and ideology into the processes, manner, methods, and means by which the university operates.

The world has changed in such a way that research universities are the new centers of innovation   and invention. They are the places where young people are being trained both formally and informally to solve the new challenges of the technology-driven global economy. Universities are at the intersection of knowledge creation, technological innovation and disruption, and the potential application of technology through entrepreneurship (Roberts 2009). “We know that knowledge is becoming more and more vital to our societies, and that our economic prosperity depends as never before on discoveries born in institutions such as [Harvard and Yale],” stated Drew Faust, President of Harvard University (Faust 2012). She believes that the tough job for university leaders is balancing change with tradition. Given the societal role of universities, they play a vital role in defining aspirations and possibilities for the long term.

Conclusion:  All of the major pieces of the infrastructure are in place: entrepreneurship pedagogy – SOM, academic maker space – the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design, venture creation – the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, and social entrepreneurship – InnovateHealth Yale. Through collaborations across the university an environment has been created that will foster a culture of commercialization: patterns of behavior that lead to a dominant attitude of deliberate or conscious entrepreneurship as opposed to serendipitous or happenstance entrepreneurship. The notion is that students would consciously set out to create viable, scalable and sustainable ventures. The culture that makes this idea possible has evolved during the course of my ethnographic fieldwork. Initially, I characterized the culture as the traditional academic “silo” culture, but through strong and thoughtful leadership at the student, faculty and administration levels there is an emerging culture of collaboration. If this holds true Yale will emerge as another bastion of world-class innovation and entrepreneurship.