Can Business Schools Teach Entrepreneurship?
April 9th, 2009An interesting post by Xconomy on the topic. It’s been a on-going topic and there are no clear answers.
Check the post at Can Business Schools Teach Entrepreneurship?
In “vibrant ecosystems” such as Route 128 and Silicon Valley, business schools are embedded and students easily find or develop ideas. But I am less sure Business Schools really teach. They explain, they expose and of course they teach management. As I comment on that post:
There is a talk by Prof Byer (Stanford) about the Silicon Valley and Stanford ecosystems, where the author claims about 5% of companies are direct transfers of technology:http://spie.org/documents/Newsroom/audio/Byer.pdf
It is not clear how many companies Stanford alumni have created. At least 2′500 but probably many more. Now the role of business schools is another subject of interest. You have stories on both sides, i.e. pure engineers or scientists (Google, Yahoo, Cisco in the academia, Apple outside) or entrepreneurs from bus. schools (Sun Micro, eBay).
Tags: Boston, Entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley
April 9th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Wait a second. Weren’t Bechtolsheim and Joy two of the four co-founders of Sun? To claim that Sun devolved from the efforts of b-school entrepreneurs seems just a bit wacky. Sun was Baskett and Bechtolsheim’s DARPA-funded university workstation, and Joy’s (and Fabry’s and Ferrari’s) DARPA-funded university operating system. (Further, DARPA (Bob Kahn) insisted that the SUN workstation run Berkeley Unix. Kahn also insisted that Berkeley Unix include a TCP/IP protocol stack. Kahn was/is one smart cookie.)
April 14th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
I agree with you but it is also true that both McNealy and Khosla were from bus. schools so the complement of engineers and business school people may have been important here.
July 3rd, 2009 at 5:33 am
Scott McNealy had operational experience in chip manufacturing, and Vinod Khosla had an engineering degree from IIT as well as his MBA from Stanford, so we can’t strictly speak of ’suits’ vs. ‘nerds’.
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:51 am
Clearly there is a debate about business schools and I tend to agree with your comments on the importance of nerds to whom Paul Graham gives some much credit.