Description
During this such a elucidation examines entrepreneurship education insights jack m. wilson.
Entrepreneurship Education Insights
Jack M. Wilson
Distinguished Professor of Higher Education, Emerging Technologies, and Innovation
President Emeritus, the University of Massachusetts
About Jack M. Wilson: Jack M. Wilson is the President Emeritus of the University of
Massachusetts and the Distinguished Professor of Higher Education, Emerging
Technologies, and Innovation at UMass Lowell. Prior to coming to the University of
Massachusetts he served as the J. Erik Jonsson ’22 Professor of Physics Engineering
Science, Information Technology, and Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute –
where he also served as a research center director, dean, and provost. At RPI he co-
founded the Paul Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship with Mark Rice
who later served as Dean and Vice Provost at Babson and WPI. In 1993 Wilson founded
the ILinc Corporation with two new graduates from RPI. They took that company
through three rounds of venture capital and then acquired Allen Communications and
John Bryce Training, in a triple reverse merger with Gilat Communications from Israel.
The resulting Company, Mentergy, was a $500 million market cap company on NASDAQ
in March 2000, a few weeks after the merger. Wilson has also served as a consultant to
many large corporations (IBM, AT&T, etc) as well as an advisor to several high
technology startups. He is past Chair of the Commission on Innovation Competitiveness
and Economic Prosperity (CICEP) of the American Public and Land-grant Universities
(APLU)–the national public research universities.
Education in Entrepreneurship is inherently a multi-disciplinary effort. That is a great
strength of entrepreneurship, but it also provides significant challenges for entrepreneurship
programs –particularly in large research universities. While it is desirable that my original
profession of Physics be situated in a multidisciplinary context, it is not mandatory. Fields like
physics, accounting, marketing, chemistry, mathematics, and many other traditional fields can
be, and often are, taught in contexts in which the multidisciplinary nature is almost incidental.
Entrepreneurship cannot be taught effectively without a multi-disciplinary context.
There are other fields with analogous challenges. Environmental science, which began to elbow
its way into research universities about five decades ago, challenged universities to redefine
disciplines and made it more difficult to use the discipline specific criteria of appointment,
promotion, tenure, and curriculum development that had served research universities so well for
the first half of the twentieth century.
A multidisciplinary field challenges the usual serial canon of the established disciplines. Is the
senior student in environmental science expected to know the same things to the same level as a
senior in Biology? A senior in chemistry? A senior in physics? A senior in political science?
Or, is the student expected to master ALL of these fields? The new scholarship was even a more
daunting for the new scholars –who were being evaluated for promotion and tenure. They found
themselves being held to the standards of several departments simultaneously, and that
represented a bar too high for many of them.
Entrepreneurship is often taught in Schools of Business –as it is in the Manning School of
Business at UMass Lowell. Entrepreneurs are usually drawn from fields with undergraduate
majors outside of business –with the largest plurality coming from engineering and with
engineering and science making up the single largest group of entrepreneurs. For this reason,
one will often find entrepreneurship being taught in engineering programs or even science
programs. While this brings the programs closer to the source of the future entrepreneurs, it
disconnects those programs from the source of skills and experience that is found in the schools
of business –a set of skills that is often sorely lacking in the programs that create the most
entrepreneurs.
Clearly it is the cross-fertilization of a discipline (engineering, science, medicine, nursing, music,
art, etc) with the management skills and the principles of entrepreneurship that generates the
most promise for creation of successful entrepreneurs. That cross fertilization essentially
mandates that students from disciplines work with students from management in cross functional
teams that work together on entrepreneurial ideas.
This means that a curriculum needs to provide courses where students of different backgrounds
can meet and study and work together. For more traditional discipline oriented faculty this can
be a problem. Advanced courses in Entrepreneurship cannot be saddled with so many pre-
requisites that only one kind of student can possible qualify to take the course. For the faculty
member teaching the courses, this can be a challenge –because they cannot expect that every
student would have the advanced understanding of concepts in accounting, finance, marketing,
mathematics, or technical skills that they might like to expect in an advanced classroom.
Accrediting bodies found some of this challenging at first, but most have found ways to allow
what is widely recognized as the desirable multi-disciplinary approaches that mix students of
varying backgrounds. Not all faculty have reached the same rapprochement.
Entrepreneurship is learned experientially. Although research has shown that nearly every
subject is best learned through engagement, and especially experiential education, it is hard to
imagine learning entrepreneurship without real exposure to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial
experiences –real or simulated. In order to accomplish this many programs –including our own -
endeavor to provide mentoring opportunities and exposure to entrepreneurs in residence. For
Umass Lowell, that is a work in progress but we expect that part of our program to grow.
One very successful experiential education program, mentioned earlier by Steve Tello, is the
Difference Makers Program at Umass Lowell. In this program the students are given exposure to
entrepreneurship in the broadest context in their freshman year. Many chose.to become involved
in projects -most of consist of cross functional teams of students.
Entrepreneurship cannot be taught to students by lecturing them (telling them) about what
entrepreneurship is and what entrepreneurs do. In some fashion, the students must have the
experience of being in an entrepreneurial situation. It is well known that learning requires actual
engagement and that means that a class full of students listening to a great lecturer –with many
of the students drifting off.- is not a great class. A great class is one in which the students are
engaged in doing interesting things and challenging one another with ideas. If anyone is drifting
off in the great class –it should be the professor –not the students.
In our classes this means that students are required to present cases drawn from real
entrepreneurial challenges –leading to class debate on issues. They need to do a semester long
paper that uses the tools developed in the calls to analyze a new venture –with one they want to
develop or one that they get connected to in some fashion. They hear from, and debate with,
actual entrepreneurs who have created new business and faced challenges. Some of these have
included Carol Vallone (WebCT, Horizon/Wimba, Educate-Online), John Pulichino (Swiss
Army Knife luggage), Robert Pozen (MFS, Secretary of Economic Development), Raj Melville
(Merrimac Valley Sandbox), Manijeh Goldberg (Privo Technologies –a new MIT spinoff) and
many others. But even this level of engagement in class is not enough. Outside of class activities
including internships and co-ops as well as participation in business plan competitions,
accelerator projects, and the Difference Maker Competition are critical.
Education in Entrepreneurship demands a diverse faculty. Successful entrepreneurship
programs work hard to supplement more traditionally trained faculty, who have obtained their
PhDs at prestigious institutions and have demonstrated their scholarly capabilities through peer-
reviewed research, with faculty who have had actually experience as entrepreneurs, but may not
be able to show a record of scholarly publication. Most institutions now have ways to hire both
kinds of faculty, but the integration of the groups is not always smooth. The most respected
programs have faculty that represent both kings of important experience –academic credentials
and extensive entrepreneurial experience. In the ideal world, all of the faculty would have both
sets of credentials, but in the real world that is a fairly rare circumstance. Thus the best strategy
is to mix faculty with a spectrum of skills and experience. In some cases, the faculty members
with the less traditional credentials are known as faculty of practice or clinical faculty and are
hired, paid, and promoted with standards more appropriate to their backgrounds and skills.
In my experience as the co-founder of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at
RPI, where I also served as three different kinds of Dean and as provost, these non-traditional
faculty members are often among the best and the most important faculty to the educational
program. I would say that I have observed similar situations on the UMass campuses as well as
in the great local programs like those at MIT, Babson, and WPI.
Entrepreneurship is more of an Art than a Science –from business plan competitions to the
lean launch pad. Entrepreneurship today is in a state of flux as the field has recoiled from the
prescriptive approach of the last decade in which the business plan and business plan
competitions defined the science of entrepreneurship. The annoying fact that many, if not most,
new businesses simply did not use business plans was viewed as something undesirable and
needing to be corrected. As scholars looked at start-ups in a systematic fashion, they also
observed that even those that did have business plans rarely executed those business plans in a
linear fashion. In fact, most successful new businesses ended up on a trajectory that was not
envisioned in the original plan. The ability of a new venture to change its business model
dramatically in mid-course has come to be known as a pivot. This has led to many scholars
abandoning the idea of the business plan altogether.
Steve Blank became the leading apostle of business plan rejection about five years ago.
1
In 2009
he wrote that “In the real world, most business plans don’t survive the first few months of
customer contact. And even if they did – customers don’t ask to see your business plan.
2
Steve
advocated for the supremacy of business models and he enshrined the concept of the pivot as part
of his mantra of the “Customer Development Process” with the concepts of “minimum viable
product (MVP),” “iterate and pivot”, “get out of the building,” and “no business plan survives
first contact with customers.” To be fair to many others in the field, his insights into the
shortcomings of the business plan were not entirely new, and were probably more a reaction to
the way the business plan had become unexamined enshrined dogma that hampered development
rather than helped. The problem was not that doing a business plan was bad, but that too many
people actually believed that the business plan was an actual “plan” in the sense that large
companies create plans. Most of those who taught entrepreneurship already knew that the
business plan was something that required regular testing and revision. I often told my students
that the last step in the development of ANY plan was to step back and ask yourself what you
were going to do when the plan did not go as planned. Blank made the significant contribution
of pulling together the alternate approaches, rebranding it, and it marketing it into key
constituencies –with one of his students, Eric Reis. Their Lean-Launchpad
3
model of
entrepreneurship now bills itself as the “evidence based entrepreneurship” model and Blank has
even trademarked the latter term.
The National Science Foundation embraced Blank’s and Reis’ formulation of new venture
development when they launched their iCore program a couple of years ago.
4
In many ways
they viewed it as a more scientific approach to venture creation that used the method of
hypothesis formation, quick testing, revision, further testing, and continuous refinement. Fields
as disparate as science and creative writing would perceive this process as the continuous
1
http://steveblank.com/about/
2
http://steveblank.com/2009/05/07/business-plan-competitions-2/
3
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-...trepreneurship-as-a-management-science-2011-3
4
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/
refinement of drafts while writing. It is indeed the way the world works. We build new models
of anything we study as we find out more and more detail through research. And so it is with
entrepreneurship.
In the new model, the business model canvas, originally proposed by Alexander Osterwalder
becomes the starting point.
5
(See an example below)
This transition continues to play out in entrepreneurship education programs across the country –
as well as at UMass. The most used textbooks are built under the old paradigm. Business plan
competitions continue to be held in spite of Steve Blank’s pronouncement that “I hate business
plan competitions.” Just as physicists teach Newton’s Laws and the Einstein Theory of
Relativity –which extends and alters Newton’s laws, entrepreneurship education needs to
introduce students to the process of business planning as well as the limitations and alternative
formulations, like Blanks, that have emerged. We also need to alert students to allowing any
model (including Blank’s) to morph into a dogma that could constrain innovation.
Entrepreneurship Education is essential to our region and the nation. When I chaired the
Commission on Innovation Competitiveness and Economic Prosperity of the American Public
and Land-grants Universities, we undertook several studies to ascertain the economic impact of
the public research university on a region’s economy and developed a set of reports that helped
university presidents identify, measure, and adopt best practices in regional economic
development.
6,7
It is clear that the public research university is essential to robust regional
economic development and the entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education is an important
part of that process.
Entrepreneurship Education is Challenging, Exciting, and Vital. Because entrepreneurship
education is comparatively new, potentially controversial, and extraordinarily vital, it is one of
the most exciting possible fields in which to work. More established fields that have long been
taught in particular ways have been very resistant to change to adapt to the world we live in
today. Without a firmly entrenched canon, entrepreneurship education is moving rapidly to
accommodate to the multidisciplinary nature of our environment. It needs to use the more
engaging kinds of educational activities that research in the cognitive sickness has shown
unequivocally leads to deeper learning. And it needs to be taught by faculty with diverse
experiences.
That is what makes teaching entrepreneurship so exciting today.
5
http://businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas
6
http://www.aplu.org/page.aspx?pid=265
7
http://www.aplu.org/document.doc?id=2777
doc_720412122.pdf
During this such a elucidation examines entrepreneurship education insights jack m. wilson.
Entrepreneurship Education Insights
Jack M. Wilson
Distinguished Professor of Higher Education, Emerging Technologies, and Innovation
President Emeritus, the University of Massachusetts
About Jack M. Wilson: Jack M. Wilson is the President Emeritus of the University of
Massachusetts and the Distinguished Professor of Higher Education, Emerging
Technologies, and Innovation at UMass Lowell. Prior to coming to the University of
Massachusetts he served as the J. Erik Jonsson ’22 Professor of Physics Engineering
Science, Information Technology, and Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute –
where he also served as a research center director, dean, and provost. At RPI he co-
founded the Paul Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship with Mark Rice
who later served as Dean and Vice Provost at Babson and WPI. In 1993 Wilson founded
the ILinc Corporation with two new graduates from RPI. They took that company
through three rounds of venture capital and then acquired Allen Communications and
John Bryce Training, in a triple reverse merger with Gilat Communications from Israel.
The resulting Company, Mentergy, was a $500 million market cap company on NASDAQ
in March 2000, a few weeks after the merger. Wilson has also served as a consultant to
many large corporations (IBM, AT&T, etc) as well as an advisor to several high
technology startups. He is past Chair of the Commission on Innovation Competitiveness
and Economic Prosperity (CICEP) of the American Public and Land-grant Universities
(APLU)–the national public research universities.
Education in Entrepreneurship is inherently a multi-disciplinary effort. That is a great
strength of entrepreneurship, but it also provides significant challenges for entrepreneurship
programs –particularly in large research universities. While it is desirable that my original
profession of Physics be situated in a multidisciplinary context, it is not mandatory. Fields like
physics, accounting, marketing, chemistry, mathematics, and many other traditional fields can
be, and often are, taught in contexts in which the multidisciplinary nature is almost incidental.
Entrepreneurship cannot be taught effectively without a multi-disciplinary context.
There are other fields with analogous challenges. Environmental science, which began to elbow
its way into research universities about five decades ago, challenged universities to redefine
disciplines and made it more difficult to use the discipline specific criteria of appointment,
promotion, tenure, and curriculum development that had served research universities so well for
the first half of the twentieth century.
A multidisciplinary field challenges the usual serial canon of the established disciplines. Is the
senior student in environmental science expected to know the same things to the same level as a
senior in Biology? A senior in chemistry? A senior in physics? A senior in political science?
Or, is the student expected to master ALL of these fields? The new scholarship was even a more
daunting for the new scholars –who were being evaluated for promotion and tenure. They found
themselves being held to the standards of several departments simultaneously, and that
represented a bar too high for many of them.
Entrepreneurship is often taught in Schools of Business –as it is in the Manning School of
Business at UMass Lowell. Entrepreneurs are usually drawn from fields with undergraduate
majors outside of business –with the largest plurality coming from engineering and with
engineering and science making up the single largest group of entrepreneurs. For this reason,
one will often find entrepreneurship being taught in engineering programs or even science
programs. While this brings the programs closer to the source of the future entrepreneurs, it
disconnects those programs from the source of skills and experience that is found in the schools
of business –a set of skills that is often sorely lacking in the programs that create the most
entrepreneurs.
Clearly it is the cross-fertilization of a discipline (engineering, science, medicine, nursing, music,
art, etc) with the management skills and the principles of entrepreneurship that generates the
most promise for creation of successful entrepreneurs. That cross fertilization essentially
mandates that students from disciplines work with students from management in cross functional
teams that work together on entrepreneurial ideas.
This means that a curriculum needs to provide courses where students of different backgrounds
can meet and study and work together. For more traditional discipline oriented faculty this can
be a problem. Advanced courses in Entrepreneurship cannot be saddled with so many pre-
requisites that only one kind of student can possible qualify to take the course. For the faculty
member teaching the courses, this can be a challenge –because they cannot expect that every
student would have the advanced understanding of concepts in accounting, finance, marketing,
mathematics, or technical skills that they might like to expect in an advanced classroom.
Accrediting bodies found some of this challenging at first, but most have found ways to allow
what is widely recognized as the desirable multi-disciplinary approaches that mix students of
varying backgrounds. Not all faculty have reached the same rapprochement.
Entrepreneurship is learned experientially. Although research has shown that nearly every
subject is best learned through engagement, and especially experiential education, it is hard to
imagine learning entrepreneurship without real exposure to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial
experiences –real or simulated. In order to accomplish this many programs –including our own -
endeavor to provide mentoring opportunities and exposure to entrepreneurs in residence. For
Umass Lowell, that is a work in progress but we expect that part of our program to grow.
One very successful experiential education program, mentioned earlier by Steve Tello, is the
Difference Makers Program at Umass Lowell. In this program the students are given exposure to
entrepreneurship in the broadest context in their freshman year. Many chose.to become involved
in projects -most of consist of cross functional teams of students.
Entrepreneurship cannot be taught to students by lecturing them (telling them) about what
entrepreneurship is and what entrepreneurs do. In some fashion, the students must have the
experience of being in an entrepreneurial situation. It is well known that learning requires actual
engagement and that means that a class full of students listening to a great lecturer –with many
of the students drifting off.- is not a great class. A great class is one in which the students are
engaged in doing interesting things and challenging one another with ideas. If anyone is drifting
off in the great class –it should be the professor –not the students.
In our classes this means that students are required to present cases drawn from real
entrepreneurial challenges –leading to class debate on issues. They need to do a semester long
paper that uses the tools developed in the calls to analyze a new venture –with one they want to
develop or one that they get connected to in some fashion. They hear from, and debate with,
actual entrepreneurs who have created new business and faced challenges. Some of these have
included Carol Vallone (WebCT, Horizon/Wimba, Educate-Online), John Pulichino (Swiss
Army Knife luggage), Robert Pozen (MFS, Secretary of Economic Development), Raj Melville
(Merrimac Valley Sandbox), Manijeh Goldberg (Privo Technologies –a new MIT spinoff) and
many others. But even this level of engagement in class is not enough. Outside of class activities
including internships and co-ops as well as participation in business plan competitions,
accelerator projects, and the Difference Maker Competition are critical.
Education in Entrepreneurship demands a diverse faculty. Successful entrepreneurship
programs work hard to supplement more traditionally trained faculty, who have obtained their
PhDs at prestigious institutions and have demonstrated their scholarly capabilities through peer-
reviewed research, with faculty who have had actually experience as entrepreneurs, but may not
be able to show a record of scholarly publication. Most institutions now have ways to hire both
kinds of faculty, but the integration of the groups is not always smooth. The most respected
programs have faculty that represent both kings of important experience –academic credentials
and extensive entrepreneurial experience. In the ideal world, all of the faculty would have both
sets of credentials, but in the real world that is a fairly rare circumstance. Thus the best strategy
is to mix faculty with a spectrum of skills and experience. In some cases, the faculty members
with the less traditional credentials are known as faculty of practice or clinical faculty and are
hired, paid, and promoted with standards more appropriate to their backgrounds and skills.
In my experience as the co-founder of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at
RPI, where I also served as three different kinds of Dean and as provost, these non-traditional
faculty members are often among the best and the most important faculty to the educational
program. I would say that I have observed similar situations on the UMass campuses as well as
in the great local programs like those at MIT, Babson, and WPI.
Entrepreneurship is more of an Art than a Science –from business plan competitions to the
lean launch pad. Entrepreneurship today is in a state of flux as the field has recoiled from the
prescriptive approach of the last decade in which the business plan and business plan
competitions defined the science of entrepreneurship. The annoying fact that many, if not most,
new businesses simply did not use business plans was viewed as something undesirable and
needing to be corrected. As scholars looked at start-ups in a systematic fashion, they also
observed that even those that did have business plans rarely executed those business plans in a
linear fashion. In fact, most successful new businesses ended up on a trajectory that was not
envisioned in the original plan. The ability of a new venture to change its business model
dramatically in mid-course has come to be known as a pivot. This has led to many scholars
abandoning the idea of the business plan altogether.
Steve Blank became the leading apostle of business plan rejection about five years ago.
1
In 2009
he wrote that “In the real world, most business plans don’t survive the first few months of
customer contact. And even if they did – customers don’t ask to see your business plan.
2
Steve
advocated for the supremacy of business models and he enshrined the concept of the pivot as part
of his mantra of the “Customer Development Process” with the concepts of “minimum viable
product (MVP),” “iterate and pivot”, “get out of the building,” and “no business plan survives
first contact with customers.” To be fair to many others in the field, his insights into the
shortcomings of the business plan were not entirely new, and were probably more a reaction to
the way the business plan had become unexamined enshrined dogma that hampered development
rather than helped. The problem was not that doing a business plan was bad, but that too many
people actually believed that the business plan was an actual “plan” in the sense that large
companies create plans. Most of those who taught entrepreneurship already knew that the
business plan was something that required regular testing and revision. I often told my students
that the last step in the development of ANY plan was to step back and ask yourself what you
were going to do when the plan did not go as planned. Blank made the significant contribution
of pulling together the alternate approaches, rebranding it, and it marketing it into key
constituencies –with one of his students, Eric Reis. Their Lean-Launchpad
3
model of
entrepreneurship now bills itself as the “evidence based entrepreneurship” model and Blank has
even trademarked the latter term.
The National Science Foundation embraced Blank’s and Reis’ formulation of new venture
development when they launched their iCore program a couple of years ago.
4
In many ways
they viewed it as a more scientific approach to venture creation that used the method of
hypothesis formation, quick testing, revision, further testing, and continuous refinement. Fields
as disparate as science and creative writing would perceive this process as the continuous
1
http://steveblank.com/about/
2
http://steveblank.com/2009/05/07/business-plan-competitions-2/
3
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-...trepreneurship-as-a-management-science-2011-3
4
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/
refinement of drafts while writing. It is indeed the way the world works. We build new models
of anything we study as we find out more and more detail through research. And so it is with
entrepreneurship.
In the new model, the business model canvas, originally proposed by Alexander Osterwalder
becomes the starting point.
5
(See an example below)
This transition continues to play out in entrepreneurship education programs across the country –
as well as at UMass. The most used textbooks are built under the old paradigm. Business plan
competitions continue to be held in spite of Steve Blank’s pronouncement that “I hate business
plan competitions.” Just as physicists teach Newton’s Laws and the Einstein Theory of
Relativity –which extends and alters Newton’s laws, entrepreneurship education needs to
introduce students to the process of business planning as well as the limitations and alternative
formulations, like Blanks, that have emerged. We also need to alert students to allowing any
model (including Blank’s) to morph into a dogma that could constrain innovation.
Entrepreneurship Education is essential to our region and the nation. When I chaired the
Commission on Innovation Competitiveness and Economic Prosperity of the American Public
and Land-grants Universities, we undertook several studies to ascertain the economic impact of
the public research university on a region’s economy and developed a set of reports that helped
university presidents identify, measure, and adopt best practices in regional economic
development.
6,7
It is clear that the public research university is essential to robust regional
economic development and the entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education is an important
part of that process.
Entrepreneurship Education is Challenging, Exciting, and Vital. Because entrepreneurship
education is comparatively new, potentially controversial, and extraordinarily vital, it is one of
the most exciting possible fields in which to work. More established fields that have long been
taught in particular ways have been very resistant to change to adapt to the world we live in
today. Without a firmly entrenched canon, entrepreneurship education is moving rapidly to
accommodate to the multidisciplinary nature of our environment. It needs to use the more
engaging kinds of educational activities that research in the cognitive sickness has shown
unequivocally leads to deeper learning. And it needs to be taught by faculty with diverse
experiences.
That is what makes teaching entrepreneurship so exciting today.
5
http://businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas
6
http://www.aplu.org/page.aspx?pid=265
7
http://www.aplu.org/document.doc?id=2777
doc_720412122.pdf