America is taken with Silicon Valley. Its culture seems ideally suited to the US society. It leans on a meritocratic ideology, fosters freedom to explore any ideas, and uses the market to determine success. We read of the pride with which those “climbing the ladder” of entrepreneurship describe their failures in successive start-ups. The pursuit of the “killer app,” of constantly stretching to find the next big idea, permeates the Valley’s culture. Failing teaches the boundaries of success; succeeding the first time might be luck; succeeding after successive failures is more robust.
In talking with faculty about their research and with PhD students working on their dissertations, I see the same culture. In a way the individual scholar’s career has all the underpinnings of startups. Mentors of aspiring academics are the venture capitalists. They listen to the “pitch” of the young PhD candidate; they evaluate all the other opportunities for intellectual investments on their part; and they give feedback prior to making decisions about whether to support the venture of the research project. The investment they offer is their intellectual resources to help the “startup” reach fruition.
Startup entrepreneurs and scholars share the motivation of the hunt for the new, interesting, and successful. For some entrepreneurs, the money generated is a desirable by-product of the work, not the main motivation. For many scholars the prestige-boost of significant innovation is a desirable by-product of the work, not the main motivation. The adrenaline boost of inventing the “new” is common to both cultures.
The life of a scholar is filled with failures. Most ideas of most academics don’t survive first evaluations. Just like entrepreneurs, the best scholars learn to fail fast and move to another target. One of the most prominent scholars whom I met as a young PhD student was labeled by his colleagues as having 100 ideas at any one time, but 99 of them were bad. In the same breath, they said that the one good idea was often revolutionary. Learning from failures is common to successful scholars and successful entrepreneurs. In both domains, it’s common that a failed idea of years earlier is applied successfully in a new context later.
Idea generation, thus, is one of the attributes of good scholars and good entrepreneurs. Without ideas of new thrusts, nothing happens. Voracious consumption of what’s happening in the field, networking with others, examining ideas that others are using — all of these are tools to generate new ideas. Synthesizing multitudes of thoughts of others often leads to breakthroughs.
Some successful scholarship takes on big problems that can be solved only with long-term development. Some scholars spend decades on uncovering new insights. While the culture of startups generally is less interested in long-term outcomes, there are many examples of startups whose real contributions come only after a maturity. Too many scholars working on long-term programs create intermediate products, subject to peer scrutiny, in order to validate their time investment prior to the completion of their full project.
Of course, there are many differences between entrepreneurs creating startups and academic scholars creating new knowledge. Their similarities, however, make campuses fertile breeding grounds for entrepreneurial thinking. Maybe we should use the startup metaphor more aggressively in building a culture supportive of faculty research.
Thank you for this exploration of the intersection of inquiry and entrepreneurship. Other schools have gone further and are re-imagining entrepreneurship as an academic activity: see http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/01/27/mit-starts-big-push-promote-innovation-entrepreneurship. Not surprisingly this is in the Engineering School. In engineering & sciences, invention, building and fabrication activities have been much more widely accepted as legit academic activities. However, even in that culture there are teething pains: I can remember debate at Whitehead Institute in the early days of the Human Genome Project as to whether Bioinformatics was an academic discipline or a technical support function. Georgetown lacks an engineering school and therefore access to that culture, but we might be able to do some by pursuing another model pushed hard at MIT, the independent research lab, which is also a space within which cross-disciplinary endeavors can flourish.