Vivek Wadhwa is director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and offers this advice in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Build a magnificent technology park next to a research university; provide incentives for chosen businesses to locate there; add some venture capital. That is the common recipe for harnessing higher education and industry to spur economic growth as prescribed by management consultants touting the “cluster theory” developed by Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter.
All of those are well-intentioned efforts to build Silicon Valley-style technology hubs, but they are based on the same flawed assumptions: that government planners can pick industries they want to develop and, by erecting buildings and providing money to entrepreneurs and university researchers, make innovation happen.
It simply doesn’t work that way. It takes people who are knowledgeable, motivated, and willing to take risks. Those people have to be connected to one another and to universities by information-sharing social networks.
Silicon Valley raced ahead because of its dynamism, which overwhelmed the slow pace of technological change in the Boston area. What gave Silicon Valley its advantage were its high rates of job hopping, new-company formation, and a culture of information exchange and risk taking. Silicon Valley firms understood that collaborating and competing at the same time is a recipe for success in the tech world, where complex products often comprise chunks of technology harvested from many organizations. In addition, failure was tolerated and often worn proudly.
There are important lessons here for countries such as China, Japan, Malaysia, and Russia, and for regions in the United States and Europe that have been trying for decades to replicate Silicon Valley. To boost entrepreneurship, they need to focus their energy not on infrastructure, but on people. They have to be connected to each other and be given the means to innovate and take risks. The obstacles in their path need to be removed.
Here are some ways in which they can do it:
1) Work toward removing the stigma associated with failure—which is the most significant inhibitor to entrepreneurship. The public needs to be educated to understand that, in the high-tech world at least, experimentation and risk taking are the paths to success, and that success is often preceded by one or more failures. That idea must be discussed frequently by political leaders and taught in schools. State and local governments should establish venture funds for entrepreneurs who are starting their second or third businesses after failing.
2) Teach entrepreneurship, not just to university students, but also to experienced workers. Entrepreneurs primarily come from the work force. They have ideas for technologies that can be built, and when they get tired of working for others and want to build wealth, they develop the motivation to start companies. Most often, they simply don’t know how to do this. Programs such as the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s FastTrac can teach the fundamentals.
3) Bring in skilled immigrants from all over the world. The foreign-born workers who founded a majority of Silicon Valley tech companies brought diversity and new ideas with them. Chile is trying such an experiment with its Start-Up Chile program. It is offering $40,000 and a visa to entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world to get their companies started in Chile. All they have to do is to stay in the country for six months. Chile is betting that those foreigners will teach its natives about entrepreneurship and risk taking and at the same help them build global networks.
4) Countries, such as Russia, that have deep supplies of science and engineering talent should also connect those workers with their counterparts in America and Europe who are desperately looking for such talent. This should be a simple matter of setting up Web sites and internships and easing regulations.
5) In the long term, most regions need to improve their education systems. A focus on quality and freedom of thought and of expression would go a long way toward preparing children for the high-tech world.
To read the entire commentary, click here.
I say cluster a number of small businesses together, treat them like research labs and call it a University. Do business, teach business, create/incubate business(s) all at once.
-Isn’t the paradigm in Memphis that we are all about the University System? College grads are not usually entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs are and they come in all colors and backgrounds. Entrepreneurship precedes college-gradness in importance and order.
-College grads usually don’t have the mindset to startup anything, they think want a career, but, what they find out is that they only want a paycheck. We cultivate that ethos here. We just keep trying to sidestep that everything and everyone we need to succeed is here now and look outside for help as if we blame everyone else who lives here. We only have ourselves to blame and we are the only solution at the same time. If we don’t figure that out and base all plans on that fact, there is no hope for this city.
– From civil service to private business you can see that a culture of “I don’t want to serve anyone but myself” is thick here, deal with it, seriously.
– No one is born with talent, you are just in an atmosphere which requires you to pay closer attention to detail or not.
– Though usually, ALL are created equal, but, after you’re born, things change.
The only focus of our university system should be the quality of the service they provided based in statistical feedback and placement. Get those two right and you can get on to the rest but don’t lose focus on what’s rally important, sometimes you have to suck it up.
You want entrepreneurs here? You have to make this a place they want to be.
How do you do that?
Get the obstacle and moving targets of rules out of here and start enforcing standards based rules diligently and with integrity. Corruption must go or the city dies and it’s Corruption that will kill it.