John Speaking About Open Source Ventures
John Robb – Open Source Venture from East Bay Pictures on Vimeo.
Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?
A study shows that the more entrepreneurial classes taught at the MBA level, the more likely students are to become entrepreneurs.
Professors at the Wellesley, Massachusetts-based college analyzed a survey of some 3,755 alumni and found that two (“or better yet three”) entrepreneurship classes strongly affected students’ decisions to pursue start-ups, and that writing a student business plan also had some influence, though not as strong.
It doesn’t, however, explain what kind of entrepreneurship these graduates engage in. If the metric is as basic as ‘started a business’, this is next-to-useless knowledge. Why?The kind of entrepreneurship matters.
Rentiers coming out of an MBA and domain squatting, starting a GroupOn clone, door-to-door insurance, or worse, realtor etc shouldn’t be weighted the same as catalysts – who shatter old assumptions, build out new markets, etc.
That is, those who create opportunity and not simply capture it are the kind of entrepreneur the world needs. If that’s what these 3-entrepreneurship-class-graduates are doing, then great. Else, this study in no way proves the idea that entrepreneurship can be taught, despite the declarations of this MBA program, these professors, and these students (all of whom share a huge financial interest in doing just that)
“It’s time to cast off the prejudiced question, ‘Why teach entrepreneurship?’, because we now have excellent empirical evidence that it makes difference. We think that entrepreneurship should be taught not only for the production and training of entrepreneurs but also to help students decide if they have the right stuff to be entrepreneurs before they embark on careers for which they may be ill-suited,” they write.
Of course entrepreneurship can be taught. But the solution isn’t the superficial application of two, maybe three classes when you’re 30 and paying a $100k entrance fee to the upper class.
Like any other form of thinking, it’s a lifelong process, and not a destination. Institutionalize that, and the world changes.
Idea: Lucky Magazine Mobile App
Lucky has streamlined the magazine business. It’s essentially a curated compilation of ads for particular demographic. I realize this isn’t unique to this brand, but they do seem to be ahead of the curve a bit.
For example, they include a ‘text to purchase’ code for each item, which they then charge and ship to your account with them. (No doubt, what they loosely call articles are just a veneer for affiliate relationships.)
In a ham-handed approach to mobile though, Lucky built an app that curated random selections, and just shoved tons of advertising into it. The user reviews are terrible.
What would be cooler, and they do this in dead-wood by including a page of stickers to mark stuff you’re interested in, is if they included QR codes. Gives you the option to text if you’re so inclined, but more useful, it captures, stores ‘your’ collection (data they can turn around and sell), and pipes you (through their affiliate channel of course) to where you can buy it (can even include a best deal option if they have the right bizdev team). Option to get AR snazzy if they want to put in some investment.
Anyway, I don’t ‘read’ the mag, but it’s an interesting case study in curation.
Lytro – Light Field Photography
Lytro is slick. It captures light in all directions when taking a picture, effectively negating shutter lag and zoom. (Demo in the link.) There’s a billion security uses for this, but at the consumer level, this further lowers the barrier to ubiquitous great photography. In a way, it does to photography what blogging did to print media.
Which is fine, because photography, like writing, is a feature, a means, not an end. And there’s no reason you as an individual can’t take pictures that, for all intents and purposes, are indiscernible from the work of the self-titled Photographers who shoot those odd snooty looks down the lens of their analog cameras. Its then just a question of how well you consistently capture great stuff and deliver it in a quality way to an interested audience.
The company is shooting for us all to buy their forthcoming camera though, instead of licensing the technology, which is goofy, unless they’re going to release the next great cell phone.
(Hat tip to Terry for passing this along.)