“It is Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough – it’s technology married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our heart sing,” proclaimed Steve Jobs when he introduced the iPad 2.  Jobs credits Apple’s success to working at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, and sees the iPad as a continuation of that tradition.  On another occasion he said, “One of the greatest achievements at Pixar was that we brought these two cultures together and got them working side by side.”  Although Jobs dropped out of Reed College, he continued to audit classes in calligraphy: “I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.  It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”  This is another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection of the arts and technology,” wrote his biographer Walter Isaacson.  “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the MAC would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.  And since Windows just copied the MAC, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

The foregoing discussion about Jobs’ belief about how great products and ideas are formed at the intersection of the humanities and technology is important background on an emerging or re-emerging dialogue at Harvard, Yale and MIT, among other universities, about the relationship between the intellectual traditions of the humanities and technology.  In a thought provoking Boston Globe opinion piece, titled “At MIT, the Humanities are Just as Important as STEM,” Deborah Fitzgerald, professor of History of Technology in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society and dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, weighed in on what she says is the recent debate about the role of the humanities in American education and concerns about the STEM disciplines eclipsing the humanities fields in relevance and career prospects.  Fitzgerald asserts that while students need advanced technical knowledge and skills, they also need “an in-depth understanding of human complexities – the political, cultural, and economic realities that shape our existence-as well as fluency in the powerful forms of thinking and creativity cultivated by the humanities, arts, and social sciences.”  She further states, “Calling on both STEM and humanities disciplines – as mutually informing modes of knowledge – we aim to give students a toolbox brimming over with tools to support them throughout their careers and lives.” For Fitzgerald, this toolbox includes: critical thinking skills, history, anthropology, an ability to work with and interpret numbers and statistics, access to the insights of great writers and artists, a willingness to experiment, to open up to change, and the ability to navigate ambiguity.

The senior Yale administrator in the School of Engineering and Applied Science who brought Fitzgerald’s opinion piece to my attention, wrote in an e-mail that Fitzgerald presents an interesting perspective on “other factors that tip the hat in Yale’s way when it comes to the wide-tool-box of skills for entrepreneurial efforts.”  Clearly he appreciates the competitive advantage that Yale has because of the wide tool box it offers students.  This comment is confirmed by a statement made to me by a Yale undergraduate who wanted to be an engineer because he believed that with a quantitative background opportunities would be available to him.  Yet he chose Yale over MIT because as he said: Yale would give him the polish he needed.  Also, he wanted to study history and other non-engineering subjects.  He mentioned also that he did not want to be in an environment where he would have experienced peer pressure to start a business.  This is an ironic statement in light of the fact that he founded several businesses while at Yale and one of his ventures was so successful in challenging industry leaders in the company’s sector that it was purchased by the industry leader.  I am aware of another Yale student who was admitted to MIT but chose Yale for the same reasons as the earlier example.  Interestingly, she was the leader of a student organization that promoted and sponsored student-orientated entrepreneurship events.

In an article titled, “Toward Cultural Citizenship” about the crisis in the humanities at Harvard it was stated that “Professors in the humanities are struggling with how to integrate the study we really value with the world that our undergraduates inhabit – a world of smartphones, texting, Twitter, and Facebook.”  Perhaps a part of the problem here lies in the fact that the professor is looking at the decline in students who major in the humanities from the professor’s perspective or interest, as opposed to understanding the environment that students are operating in and shaping skills that make sense to them in the world they inhabit.  Another Harvard professor is tackling this issue head on by framing a pedagogical experience focused on a research question that engages students in learning by doing.  He thinks that the changes happening now are a part of a revolution, a “participatory turn in culture, that is, in part about entrepreneurship and invention.”

In academia the debate about the relative contributions and relevance of the humanities and the sciences and technology has been ongoing for decades.  The British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow proffered his viewpoint on this debate through his famous 1959 lecture that was subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.  Its thesis is that “the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups” – the sciences and the humanities.  For Snow this polarization is a “sheer loss to us all.”

Jobs put this loss in a contemporary business context when he said “Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA.  Even when they saw the MAC, they couldn’t copy it well.  They totally didn’t get it.”

“We are committed to changing the odds for better outcomes related to promoting health and preventing disease, nationally and globally,” proclaimed Martin Klein, Director, InnovateHealth Yale and Associate Dean for Development and External Affairs, Yale School of Public Health.  The occasion was the inaugural presentations and award for the Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health (“Thorne Prize”).  On its website IHY states that it is the “home for those at Yale interested in creating innovative solutions to health challenges.”  Further the website states, IHY is committed “to training students to become change agents, catalyze interdisciplinary entrepreneurial efforts to address national and global health problems.”  IHY participants intend to achieve their goals of tackling health related problems through using the principles of entrepreneurship and innovation.  They are social entrepreneurs.

J. Gregory Dees, who many consider the father of social entrepreneurship, provides the following definition of social entrepreneurs:  “Social entrepreneurs play the role of change agents in the social sector: adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value); recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission; engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning; acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand; and exhibiting heightened accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.”

Dees says that “social entrepreneurs are one species of the genus entrepreneur.”  A mission focus affects how social entrepreneurs perceive and assess opportunities. Social impact is the gauge of value creation.  Also in the 21st century, demonstrable and measurable outcomes are matrices by which social impact is analyzed.  It is noteworthy that foundations and patrons that support social entrepreneurs are no longer giving social entrepreneurs a free pass on accountability; they are trying to develop and implement objective and definable criteria to evaluate the efficacy of funded projects.  An example is the judges impaneled for the Thorne Prize; they queried each group about how they would use the prize money, as well as how they intended to produce revenue to ensure a sustainable venture.

Working to improve the life outcomes of children born in poor communities is one of the things that social change agents attempt to achieve in their own way.  The presentations stood out in the manner that each of the presenting groups sought to achieve change:  Franchising Clean is focused on providing clean water in impoverished communities in Ecuador through water franchises integrated with community-based owners and operators.  Ongoing support of these local operators is one of the distinguishing factors from the typical NGO approach to dealing with poor water conditions. Also on the water theme, Fluid Screen is developing a hand-held device that detects bacteria in water and blood in as little as 30 minutes, in contrast to the current methods that require days.  The aim is to change the way people test water to detect environmental contamination.  FortiChai intends to improve the health of Indian urban slum-dwellers through nutritionally fortified chai tea, a staple of the urban slum-dweller’s diet. Khushi Baby aims to improve immunization rates by encouraging adherence to immunization schedule.  The child will wear a silicone bracelet with an embedded chip that records immunizations and sends this information simultaneously to a parent’s Android phone and a cloud-based database. This innovation is significant because 1.5 million children die every year from vaccine preventable diseases.

Khushi Baby won the $25, 000 Thorne Prize.  Khushi Baby was conceived as a class project in MENG 491 “Appropriate Technologies for the Developing World.”  This class is co-sponsored by the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.  Thus beyond winning this prestigious award, Khushi Baby validated the pedagogical approach wherein students in MENG 491 were taught how to formulate questions in what one of the professors calls “target rich spaces” to solve the challenge of delivering vaccines along a cold chain in developing counties.  I had attended some of the early ideation sessions of MENG 491; therefore it was an ethnographer’s dream to see the sprout of an idea turn into a bud that will morph into a sustainable and scalable enterprise.

The four members of the Khushi Baby team, Teja Padma (SOM ’14), Ruchit Nagar (YC ’15), Ifedolapo Omiwole (YC ’14) and Leen van Besien (YC ’14) are student exemplars of change agents. They combined their intellectual capital and passion to produce a solution to a global problem that will improve the life chances of thousands of children.

In an earlier post I explained that the theory of academic capitalism enables me to analyze what Yale as a modern research university is doing to integrate with the 21^st century knowledge economy. The theory of academic capitalism captures the many ways, methods, processes and means through which market and market-like behaviors, as well as a market ethos and ideology have been incorporated in postsecondary education, thus blurring the boundaries between markets and higher education. In my view, the infrastructure associated with academic capitalism enables Yale to monetize the value of the new knowledge created by faculty and students. And it empowers students to innovate for the new economy, and if they chose, create their own jobs and control the intellectual property and the intellectual capital.

Academic capitalism raises the question: What is the proper alignment of a university’s mission? Essentially, this methodology leads to the conclusion that entrepreneurship and commercialization are part of a new corporate logic, traditionally foreign to the academy, which is affecting and for some infecting the ways in which academic institutions are run (Duranti 2013). Whatever the contra-arguments are, the trend is clear: there is an inexorable convergence of the academy, markets and market-like behaviors.

This week the Yale School of Management (“SOM”) announced that it is expanding and modernizing entrepreneurship programming.

The announcement of the new Entrepreneurship Program coincides with the appointment of Dr. Kyle Jensen as the inaugural Shanna and Eric Bass ’05 Director of Entrepreneurial Programs. Jensen will design and teach courses in entrepreneurship. He will recruit and advise student entrepreneurs, establish programming that complements the work of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and other university resources, strengthen connections with SOM alumni entrepreneurs and entrepreneurially minded constituents across Yale.

This is significant because the SOM piece is perhaps the last major piece of the student-orientated infrastructure that Yale needs to credibly establish itself as a major player in university-based student-led innovation, technology and entrepreneurship. At Yale’s peers, such as Stanford and Harvard, the B-School drives the innovation and entrepreneurship agenda. Yale’s efforts seem to be coalescing around an ethos of collaboration across the university, sharing agenda making and being thoughtful about how the university’s resources are being deployed in the best interest of all its students: undergraduate, graduate and professional students. Yale, from a peer-group perspective, can maintain a competitive position to recruit students and faculty who are interested in innovation, technology and entrepreneurship.

All of the major pieces of the infrastructure are in place: entrepreneurship pedagogy – SOM, academic maker space – the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”), venture creation – the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, and social entrepreneurship – InnovateHealth Yale. The next phase of the build-out entails fostering 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.

Along these lines CEID, has expanded its Summer Fellowship program to include graduate students.  This is meaningful because there is a higher likelihood that graduate students start a project with commercializing of their efforts in mind.

The pattern that is emerging at Yale encapsulates an environment that provides resources and facilities wherein students can engage their curiosity in the realm of experiential learning to solve real world problems. “In a sense, science and technology are nudging humanity toward the old path of learning by interacting with things rather than with abstractions,” stated science writer Timothy Ferris. He continues, “Science may be new, but scientific experimentation is essentially a refinement of the preliterate practice of interrogating nature directly — of trying things out, getting your hands dirty, and discarding what doesn’t actually work.”

Students, alumni and university patrons seem to be demanding an experiential problem based approach to critical thinking, effective problem-solving and enhanced communication skills. Arguably these skills will give students another framework to identify and evaluate new markets and new opportunities within existing markets.

The central question of my ethnography is: What does it mean to prepare educationally to be a 21^st century knowledge worker in the 21^st century global knowledge economy? The hypothesis is that the aftermath of the Great Recession combined with the pace of technological change provides the socio-cultural context within which to investigate how educationally privileged students at a liberal arts college are using experiential learning in regards to innovation and entrepreneurship to equip themselves to be 21^st century knowledge workers.  The broader economic and social changes associated with the Great Recession provide the context within which to analyze how the educational elite are using experiential learning to handle the trends that were either began in the aftermath of or accelerated by the Great Recession.  Culture has meaning only in its social context; it has no significance by itself pronounced the preeminent British social anthropologist Edmund Leach.

Macro- and micro-level trends illuminate the circumstances that form the setting for the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at Yale that is being examined in my research.

Macro-level trends:

• Technology allows jobs to be done on-line and fractionally.
• Disassociation of the U.S. stock market from the operation of the economy.
• Unification of the global capital markets with the U.S. Federal Reserve as banker to the global economy.
• Romanization of entrepreneurs as cool and capitalist superheroes.
• Specialized media coverage of technology and entrepreneurship, e.g. Bloomberg West
• Modern capitalists are both mission- and profit-driven and think of building their businesses in terms of decades rather than quarters.
• The era of financialized capitalism is reshaping the political economy based on the capitalist economic premise of “shareholder value.”
• Convergence of academia and the global knowledge economy.
• Universities are at the intersection of knowledge creation, technological innovation and disruption, and the potential application of technology through entrepreneurship.

Micro-level trends:

• Modernization of the university’s approach to the production and use of knowledge.
• Student demand for experiential learning related to innovation and entrepreneurship.
• Alumni engagement in the university through entrepreneurship initiatives.
• University benchmarking against its peer group now includes programs in innovation and entrepreneurship.
• Completion of the build-out of substantial pieces of the infrastructure for entrepreneurship: a) expansion of Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (“YEI”) programs, and developing a sustainable track record of successful start-ups, b) opening Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design in 2012, collaboration with YEI, InnovateHealth Yale and the Yale School of Medicine, c) opening the new building for the School of Management in 2014, and potential expansion and modernization of its entrepreneurship curriculum.

The context for my research at Yale is encapsulated in an environment where the university is transitioning to a more pragmatic stance on the production and use of knowledge.  Yale is establishing the right conditions for creating a culture of commercialization of student-led innovation and entrepreneurship.  Students are poised to capitalize on this emerging culture.

What if there is a futurist committee at Yale and other universities that is mandated to continuously ask and answer the question, what’s next?

Adbusters poster advertising the original protest – September 17, 2011

“We Are the 99%,” the mantra of the Occupy Wall Street (“OWS”) movement, signifies a change in attitudes about attainability of their expectations, hopes and aspirations.  This metaphor, We Are the 99%, represents an emerging worldview that encompasses notions about extreme inequalities in income and opportunity in American society.  Whatever your view is about the efficacy of the OWS movement, there is no denying that its tactics brought the issues of income inequality, inequality of opportunity and the consequences of the aftermath of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis into the public discourse and awakened the collective consciousness about these issues.  Not since the 1960’s had Americans been confronted with such fundamental questions about what it means to be an American, and what are the inherent rights and obligations of its citizenry. The profound question for Millennials is whether the Great Recession laid bare truths about American society that are incongruent with an American Dream which idealizes notions of upward mobility, and an open society for all who strive for a better life.

This public dialogue precipitated by the OWS movement formed the early backdrop or cultural milieu within which my research about how students at an elite liberal arts college are being prepared as 21^st century knowledge workers.  Initially, my thoughts were that the OWS movement was a major part of the Millennial generation’s quest for a generational voice and generational identity.  Even people who did not go to Zuccotti Park in New York City or the Green in New Haven were impacted by the rhetoric on both sides of the debate about income and opportunity inequality.  But the more I looked into the subject, I became convinced that there was a more practical and sustainable way for Millennials to assert their generational voice and their generational identity than participation in the movement.  For example, they have quietly and politely demanded that their education and training as knowledge workers empower them to choose whether they create their own jobs or work for a company of any size. See last week’s post “Disruptive Learning.”

A senior engineering major told me that during the course of his interviews with a global bank a member of the bank’s senior management mentioned that he viewed himself as a well paid employee, and did not feel any loyalty to the bank.  The engineering student was admonished by the senior banker to come to the bank with his eyes wide open, and not be deluded by the nice sounding rhetoric about the bank that he hears during the interview process.  The engineering student was looking to me for confirmation of the banker’s admonishment.  I understood what the senior banker was stating: essentially employees are on their own to protect their interests, and further their learning and training.  The engineering student seemed to also desire confirmation that viewing his job at the bank as a means to learn about business and how businesses operate was an appropriate way to view his employment situation.  His doubts and insecurities recalled past posts in which I wrote about how severely the relationship between employer and employee had changed over the past 30 or 40 years.  Today’s students should equip themselves for a world where loyalty is not necessarily rewarded and where employees must be vigilant in continuously learning new skills and gaining new knowledge in order to be indispensable in their current place of employment or readily marketable to other employers.

Is it possible that the Millennial generational voice and generational identity is encapsulated in a heightened awareness that they must be vigilant in how they view their relationship to their employers?

Richard C. Levin, Former President Yale University

In my research I am trying to account for the surge in interest in applied knowledge and know-how through the theory of disruptive learning. It intends to explain how students at a traditionally liberal arts college and university use the institution’s intellectual, physical and financial resources to facilitate their preparation as 21^st century knowledge workers, shifting from learning as a purely intellectual regime to learning as an applied regime.  The theory covers how traditional academic subjects are put together in a learning architecture that is more experiential-based than traditional classroom learning. It explains how students are gaining access to experiential learning in the context of how to create innovations and how to engage in entrepreneurial activities and how to create either profit or mission-driven entrepreneurial ventures. Disruptive learning offers a different package of attributes valued initially by early adopters who are thinking about preparing for the 21^st global workforce in fundamentally different ways than students who are contemplating the traditional career paths pursued by graduates of elite liberal arts colleges and universities.

While the reemergence of applied science, engineering and technology as a full-fledged school at Yale is an important phase in modernizing Yale as an elite research and teaching institution, an equally important phase relates to how students use university resources to prepare for the modern workforce.  There is demand among students throughout the university for applied learning, whether in engineering, cognitive science, and business, for example.  Yale students look at other universities, such as Stanford and MIT, to see what is going on and ask why Yale does not offer more courses or training in contemporary areas of interest such as design, innovation and entrepreneurship.  Historically there was a bias against practical things.  Today’s students are demanding instruction that goes beyond framing intellectual questions.  Through their demands they seem to be signaling that their preparation as 21st century knowledge workers is too important to be left solely in the hands of university administrators and faculty.

The back story to disruptive learning at Yale is former President Richard Levin’s vision to modernize Yale. “Yale is committed to remain on everyone’s short list of the best universities in the world,” said Richard Levin.^[1]  “In the 21^st century, you must excel in science and engineering to maintain that position.  Modern space for scientific research is crucial in attracting top professors and students.  We find ourselves in stiffer competition in the sciences than in other fields,” he further stated.  As an economist he had studied the beneficial effect of scientific research on national economies; therefore he had an appreciation for the need to reawaken science and engineering as a part of his vision of transforming Yale into a modern research university and repositioning the university in the new knowledge economy.  He rethought the Yale administration’s decision in the early 1990s to eliminate the engineering department.  In 1994, he reestablished the dean of engineering post.  In 2000, he committed Yale to invest more than $1 billion in facilities for science, medicine, and technology.  For engineering, the Daniel L. Malone Engineering Center was completed in 2005.  And in 2008 the Faculty of Engineering was recognized as the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.  This decision was an acknowledgment that science and technology were reshaping the world.  The opening of the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design in 2012 was in some respects emblematic of former President Levin’s tenure and his vision to modernize Yale.  I consider him the Father of Modern Yale based on his vision and accomplishments during his 20 year term as Yale’s president.

Will the theory of disruptive learning as developed during my research at Yale bring forward propositions and or implications for other college and university campuses?

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?

Ben Silbermann, CEO of Pinterest rendered in 22,766 pins by Eric Daigh

Think of entrepreneurship as a bundle of skills; a way to think about problem solving.  “You can manipulate your odds of success by how you choose to fill out the variables in the formula.  The formula, roughly speaking, is that every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success,” says Scott Adams. Further he states, “Become a learning machine.  Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.  Think of learning as a system in which you continually expose yourself to new topics, primarily the ones you find interesting.“  If you think of yourself as a learning machine you can avoid the angst of whether you are in the right job, or whether your work is impactful, meaningful or cool.  Then the real questions become:  “Are you acquiring new skills?  Are you learning new things?”

I have blogged about why many college students engage in an activity customarily associated with entrepreneurship, yet abandon the entrepreneurship route in favor of the traditional career path.  It was commented here that “entrepreneurship may also be something of a chimera itself—vivid in the cultural imagination but hedged about with uncertainty in actual practice.  There may be a sense of security in exploring risky ventures while safely inside Yale as an educational institution that is lost after graduation.”

My hypothesis, upon deeper reflection, is that some of these graduates are actually taking “gap jobs” in the same way that some graduating high school students take a “gap year” before pursuing a college degree.  They are trying to assemble the right set of skills and business acumen, along with the confidence that they can be successful business builders, before they will take the plunge into entrepreneurship.  And while a college or university environment can provide access to information, mentors, facilities and capital, it cannot replicate the real world of work, and the dynamics of people interacting in the workplace.

Chelsea graduated two years ago. She majored in art. At her college, art was the closest major to design, which is her real interest.  She has a strong background in engineering due to the number of engineering classes she took in college.  After graduating, she took a job that allows her to combine her interest in human-centric design and engineering.  This job also provided her flexibility to continue to work on a project that she had started while a student.  During her senior year she had teamed up with two other undergrads to work on a concept related to designing and prototyping a bio-medical device.  After graduating she continued to work with her partners who were still in college.  Over the course of the next year their project has hit some major milestones, and appears to have potential as a start-up.  This summer her team will join an incubator to market test their device further and to create a start-up.

Chelsea is an example of what I term a trans-entrepreneur.  This genus of entrepreneur denotes someone who fluidly moves across the lines of employee and business builder.  It signifies the changing nature of employment in the early 21st century.  Trans-entrepreneur alludes to the transactional and temporary aspects of contemporary employment and the behavior between employer and employee.  In using the term trans-entrepreneur, I am trying to create a category that captures what is new, what is happening now.  As a modern knowledge worker Chelsea realizes that she must continuously acquire new skills and new knowledge through ongoing learning, thus she will be empowered to respond opportunistically if her side project becomes viable and sustainable.  Chelsea does not appear to have angst about what she does in her day job because the tasks she performs are complementary to the skills she needs to make her side project successful.  Her post-college knowledge acquisition includes design thinking, advanced mechanical engineering. nano-sensor technology and design, the lean start-up principles of creating a start-up venture, and how to prepare the clinical trial for a bio-medical device.  Given this wide-range of knowledge acquisition, Chelsea brilliantly exemplifies Scott Adam’s “learning machine” metaphor.

Recently I read an interview of a head hunter who places high-salaried workers in tech firms.  She said that during a job interview some interviewers will ask an applicant what side projects he is working on.  The implication is that even though you have a full-time job there is an expectation that you are pursuing a project that might morph into a start-up venture.  How would you answer the question: What side projects are you working on?

My research among Millennials has been focused on educationally privileged students who have access to world-class intellectual and physical resources, as well as access to sufficient financial capital to facilitate their preparation as 21^st century knowledge workers in the global knowledge economy.  This access gives them a tremendous advantage in the highly competitive global marketplace for high-salaried workers.  But it occurred to me recently that this cohort has an even more profound advantage: they are trained to think about problem solving and business opportunities on a global scale rather than thinking about these matters on a local or national scale.  More importantly, these students are not preparing themselves to compete for a few coveted spots in an economy defined by scarcity, but rather they are being trained to be leaders who are empowered to shape the future of a global economy which many of them define through creating abundance.

The globe is the relevant unit of capital accumulation for the capital stakeholders of tech companies such as Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, for example.  This global perspective is why the wealth that these companies have created for their stakeholders appears so enormous in absolute terms, and especially when compared to other periods of capitalism when companies and labor were bounded to local or national markets.

Educators at all levels, K-12, college, university, and professional school are grappling with the challenge of how to prepare students to succeed and prosper in the 21^st century global economy.  Harvard Business School’s (“HBS”) Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development (“FIELD”) offers an example of how an elite business school hones students’ leadership and entrepreneurial skills and their understanding of leading in a global context.  While it is the case that all of the top business schools recognize the importance of training future business leaders to think globally, I am struck by how Harvard achieves this goal through incorporating ethnographic field work as a component of experiential learning.

FIELD is a required first-year course that spans a full academic year and combines classroom pedagogy along with experiential learning in the form of a brief stint in a multinational or a local business in a foreign country.  Before the field trip, the student teams analyze a new product or service the company might introduce in the country the students are visiting.  After conducting market research and building a market profile, they produce a preliminary plan.  Then they travel to their host country and are assigned to a company for a week to test their ideas.  This is where theory meets reality: they experience all of the issues associated with developing a product or service in a classroom then testing their assumptions in a cross-cultural context.  FIELD provides students an introduction to why gaining cross-cultural knowledge makes business executives more strategic and more tactical.

Yale’s MENG 491 “Appropriate Technologies for the Developing World” is another example of how students can be trained to cultivate a global mind-set.  This course, which is co-sponsored by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, epitomizes the idea that huge global problems such as clean water, reliable electricity and efficient delivery systems for delivering vital vaccines require multi-disciplinary teams to produce the most efficient solutions.  As a part of the training in MENG 491, students are exposed to design thinking whereby they fashion a solution by engaging in human-centric thinking that sees the solution from the perspective of the end-user of the product or service.

What skills do 21^st century global knowledge workers need in order to be successful?  And which societal institutions should be responsible for making sure that today’s students are prepared to tackle global challenges in business, government, and the non-profit sectors?

Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the serial entrepreneur behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors and Solar City disclosed during his TED Talk that while in college he often asked himself, “What are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity?”  (He has a BA in economics and, separately, a BS in physics.) He concluded that sustainable transport and sustainable energy were the problems that affect the future of humanity.  After PayPal Elon Musk went on to found three other companies: Tesla Motors to build affordable all-electric cars; SpaceX to advance rocket technology to create a rapidly and fully usable rocket, the ultimate goal being to extend human life to other planets; and SolarCity to help combat global warning and minimize air pollution.

Unlike conventional capitalists, Elon Musk and some other twenty-first century capitalists, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) seem to include the social entrepreneurship element of being mission-driven in how they think about markets and opportunities to exploit: Facebook’s mission is to connect the world.  Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.  Amazon.com’s mission is to offer limitless selections at low prices and be convenient.  These 21st century capitalists are unconventional because they are blurring the lines between social entrepreneurship which measures value creation by social impact and for-profit entrepreneurship which measures value creation through profits.  These unconventional capitalists are taking a long-term view on profit making, and a short-term view of making a material difference in the lives of people globally.

Does unconventional capitalism relate to my research exploring how students are preparing to participate in the 21^st century knowledge economy?  Emphatically yes.  As Voltaire said “Judge a man [or woman] by his questions not his [her] answers.”  Whether in MENG 491 “Appropriate Technologies for the Developing World” at Yale or “Extreme” a similar class at the Stanford d. School students are asking large questions about how to use technology to improve the lives of people and create sustainable enterprises.  It is no coincidence that unconventional 21^st century capitalists are tackling global challenges by taking a page from the social entrepreneurship playbook.  By asking large questions and using business models, technologies, processes and methods that are disruptive they are addressing global problems.

The 109 Design team at Yale is another example of 21st century progressive capitalists: they have successfully designed and patented a nanosensor that will be placed in braces that are worn by adolescents who have scoliosis.  This nanosensor gathers data concerning when and how the brace is being worn.  The data will be analyzed to ensure that the brace is being worn properly; the objective being to reduce or eliminate the need for spinal surgery.  One of the members of 109 Design team had scoliosis as an adolescent and underwent this spinal surgery.  His goal is to reduce the number of children that have to have spinal surgery, and undertake the long rehabilitative process thereafter.  Recently, 109 Design team was accepted into the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Summer Fellowship Program.  During this 10-week accelerated incubator they will prove out their business model and continue the clinical trials of this nanosensor.

This discussion brings me to a conversation I had this week with a student that in an earlier blog post I had identified as a rocket scientist who along with his team were developing a hybrid rocket fuel.  He was working at a table in the design studio at the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design simultaneously looking at his open laptop and some gadgets in his hand.

“What are you working on? Is this a class project?” I asked.

“Building sensors to monitor the temperature and humidity levels in beehives; this is an extracurricular project”, he replied.

“Why are you working on this project?

His polite response was that commercial bees are dying and no one is sure why. So he and some other students are trying to build a nanosensor that would gather data that could be analyzed to understand how to create the ideal environment for commercial beehives.  Nanotechnology and nanosensors are perceived as futuristic.  This is an aspect of the “Internet of Things” whereby Big Data could be used to improve commercial beekeeping and stem the tide of commercial bees dying.  After graduation, this curious Eli accepted an offer to work in the propulsion group of SpaceX.

While my research focuses on college and university students, lately I have been thinking about the applicability of my research findings to K-12 educational levels:  How can we ensure that K-12 educators have the required resources to develop 21^st century innovators, designers and entrepreneurs?