Read. This. ............Now!

Seth's Blog: http://www.stopstealingdreams.com is ready to read and share 


Remember my earlier post about Seth Godin's notion of Type 1 & Type 2 teachers? This really builds that out.


And also remember that while most b-school educators *think* they are Type 2s, they simply are not. 
The best entrepreneurship educators ARE Type 2's


Would love YOUR thoughts - that link has free downloads in multiple versions (PDF, HTML, Kindle, Nook, etc.)

So What IS an “Entrepreneurial” Ecosystem

Any economy is an ecosystem – all the pieces are connected, often in surprising or indirect ways. But what makes it “entrepreneurial”?

How can we measure its “entrepreneurial-ness”?

In honor of TechStars’ David Cohen coming to town, I’ve updated my thoughts about how we take the state of the art of what we know and… put it to good use!

We have now officially reached over 100 different formal definitions for “industry cluster”… mostly circular. With entrepreneurial ecosystems, the most common one is “has a lot of entrepreneurial activity”… LOL but what if we want to predict? Wouldn’t a few metrics and a few slam-dunk policy prescriptions help?

Reality #1: A healthy ecosystem is one that encourages and nourishes the entrepreneurial mindset. (I know, I know... we don’t have good measures for that either…)

It nourishes it broadly & deeply – in healthy communities, people “get it” – not just the entrepreneurs and maybe service providers, but it’s in the air. I had been in Malmo, Sweden’s great MINC incubator for 30 minutes & I felt like a slacker, I need to start a venture. Had the same feeling in Chalmers’ Encubator. Or anytime I walk on Stanford’s campus. In those places, opinion leaders, especially the media get it. The “person on the street” gets it. (There are places that never get it – b-schools are remarkably blind, painfully so. But the students can get it!)

Reality #2: We do know critical predictors of entrepreneurial activity. There are three proven predictors and isn’t that a good place to start? [And, yes, I talked about this in an old blog post [http://goo.gl/zHAQQ ]

Short version? Entrepreneurial Capital includes…

                                           Human capital.

                                           Social capital

Human Capital?

Simply ask: How many people believe they are personally prepared to be an entrepreneur? Not just prospective entrepreneurs, but how many NON-entrepreneurs understand what needs to happen? How else can an inherently bottom-up phenomenon take off?

Can this be an illusion? Sure. The data reflects people starting businesses not whether they succeed, so we are already back to the entrepreneurial mindset. Knowing facts and even learning skills is NOT enough, not remotely enough. You must cultivate the mindset of an entrepreneur. Better still, cultivate the mindset of an expert entrepreneur [in the cognitive sense a la Gladwell’s book “Outliers” – if you haven’t put in your 10,000 hours, don’t tell me you’re an expert, ok?]

What does a healthy ecosystem provide to grow entrepreneurial human capital?

Training, sure, but it has to be REAL learning. To move from a novice to an expert, you need metacognition [knowing your own mind, which means intensive reflection].

You also need peer mentoring and support. It’s a lot easier to shift mental models when amongst friends. Why do think immersion events like Startup Weekend kick so much butt? [read me for more: http://goo.gl/K6TBn]

You need expert mentors; we all need people who are at our level or higher to coach us through the often harrowing shifts in mental models. Or why TechStars kicks so much butt…

And you need a maestro or two to make all this work. (And what’s funny? There are NEVER the people whose job title says so.. But in a healthy ecosystem everyone knows who these liaison-animateurs are! [google it!]

METRIC/PREDICTOR: How many deeply experiential learning activities are going on? How many groups are just meeting up, whether social media or digital imaging or hackathons or… ?

p.s. Did you know that Steve Blank is making his killer Lean Launchpad class from Stanford available online... for the cost of the text? And the Startup Weekend gang has recruited volunteers to hold in-person meetups staring in late March? If you want in, call me. If you want to help, call me. (Even if you’re not in Idaho, I’m happy to hook you up!)

Social Capital?

What would your momma say if you started a business? We are blessed in the US to have reasonably supportive social norms but it’s not quite universal. Does the media celebrate entrepreneurs? Do our civic leaders? (And do they actually get it?) Do our other institutions really get it? Even the most bureaucratic institutions can think they are pro-entrepreneur but if they don’t understand how entrepreneurs think, they are at best limited and at worst counter-productive. (Odds are, they think they that they DO get it… Yikes and…. Sigh.)

EMPHATIC POINT: Bureaucratic thinking will never get entrepreneurial thinking. Institutions operate top-down/ They LIKE top-down. But they CAN be helpful.. IFF the right people get it.

A healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem is a framework that enables and encourages the emergence of opportunities.

METRICS/PREDICTORS? So how do we know when Very Important People get it? Good place to start: Do they understand how an entrepreneurial economy works?

Do they get… churn? That to grow 1 million jobs could mean creating 10 million new jobs while 9 million jobs exit. It’s normal, it’s healthy & it freaks people out.

[Actual data from mid-2010 to mid-2011: 41 million people took a new job while 40 million left a job. Crazy? Yup. But healthy.]

Do they get… execution is far more important than ideas? The more ideas/intellectual property we have, eventually we get more ideas implemented. BUT the more ideas get implemented, it has a big (and quick) effect on ideas. The innovation pipeline is like pushing on a string. Why not pull instead?

In practice, this means… invest heavily in execution/implementation not on “creativity”. [p.s. Dick Florida agrees, btw.]

Do they get... distinctive competence? Do people in your community migrate toward roles where they add the most value to customers. Not what they do best (a/k/a “core competence”) and certainly not to what they WANT to do (or claim their charter or funders or board insist...) but where they add the most value. If people buy this, turf issues are far more manageable. So are your service providers doing things that add the most value or doing what they feel entitled to?

The same is true for economies. Ireland became the Celtic Tiger by focusing on 4 niches where they already had a sustainable competitive advantage that they could build on – all university research money went to applied research in just those 4 areas plus all industry incentives. It paid off almost overnight (and when they forgot those lessons... oops!) So in your community are leaders focusing on niches where we already can compete or worrying too much about the past?

Do they get… the economy is an ecosystem? That it is a messy web of networks? That we need to encourage connectivity? Read this: http://bit.ly/Karen_S

Who are your community’s “influentials”: Are they the people that control access to resources? Or are they the people who connect? (You can’t do both, alas; if you do both, you’re a resource-controller.)

Are your connectors truly liaison-animateurs? [I told you to google it ;) ] Are they proactive? Are they helping others to become connectors too?

In a healthy ecosystem, more and more people know more and more about the ‘map’ of the ecosystem and proactively share that intel. (Again look at Stephenson’s diagram…) Alas… very, very few communities have a detailed (and accurate) shared map of the ecosystem. If they have a map at all, it’s just a laundry list of the ‘players’…which tells us NADA about how to play the game.

p.s. Do they get… the economy is an ecosystem.. redux? Something entrepreneurs can lose sight of is that it’s an ecosystem that is highly and unpredictably interconnected. It’s NOT just new firms but also older firms. Not just small firms but large ones too. Urban & rural. High tech & low tech. Growing & shrinking. For-profit & non-profit. Even public sector & private sector. We’re all in this together folks.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Now that I’ve probably depressed you or inflamed your “Boulder Envy” or “Malmo/Gothenburg Envy”… anything we can do right now? Affordably? Let me offer several ideas where Norris is the Big Slacker - feel free to kick my butt into gear, ok?

Educate Opinion Leaders

Experiential entrepreneurship training by our best & brightest – and start nourishing the mindset broadly & deeply across your community. Find the fertile ground – youth entrepreneurship is maybe the #1 no-brainer for development. Seniorpreneurs are red hot as are disabled veterans, etc., etc.

Policy briefings for civic officials. [OK, Norris is really the slacker here...] Tell them that we bring good news.. ‘cause we do! also...

‘Visioning’ is such a New-Agey term so lets call it a ‘listening session’ – bring together a cross-section of the entrepreneurial community [broadly defined, see the “p.s.” above] and figure out where would we like to be in, say, 2020.

Everyone a Liaison-Animateur?

Why not REALLY map the entrepreneurial ecosystem in your community? Not just make lists of entrepreneurs, service providers, etc. but a real map of the playing field. (Karen Stephenson charges up to $100K to do studies but we can get a rough map for far less & mostly sweat equity. I have the software.)

The visioning, er, listening session connects with this beautifully – gives us a killer roadmap for moving forward productively. Also cheap to do. And there are terrific experts to help us pull it off… magnificently.

Maybe start with asking your community’s entrepreneurs what will trigger them forward. NOT what they are lacking and NOT what the barriers are, but… “What’s the one thing that would trigger you to start (or grow) your venture?”

                  [hmmm. .I suppose that’s one more diagnostic: Do we focus on what we have or what we don’t have? Whether it’s a civic leader or a trade group leader or… ourselves!]

I am really, really interested in your thoughts on this. Please pass this along to anyone else who might want to strangle me, er, buy me a martini. It was fun to write – thank you for reading this far.

Who’s with me????? [not to sound like Bluto in Animal House ....;) What AH character should I be?]

Educational Arsonists![1]

(or… what if we stuck a Startup Weekender’s head in an MRI?)

“Learning isn’t filling a vessel, it‘s lighting a fire” – Plutarch

Deep transformative learning is not easy. But positive emotional engagement really, really helps. Few places show that better than Startup Weekend.

As a veteran entrepreneurship scholar, my own teaching/training and research was molded by a sordid past as a tech entrepreneur (and now social entrepreneur). What has always fascinated me: Why is it the best entrepreneurship education is so insanely effective? How can we use this knowledge to grow entrepreneurial thinking in our communities? (And, sadly, why is it so hard for people who don't 'get it' to understand??) So..... What on earth is happening inside the minds of those students and, yes, us?

Transformational learning = Changing deep beliefs

True experiential learning is far more than “hands-on”. Transformative learning operates at very deep levels. What does it take to change very deep assumptions about how things work, moving us from the mindset of a novice to that of an expert? While it usually takes 10,000-20,000 hours of deliberate practice, deep transformative learning can accelerate the process. Doesn’t it seem likely that knowing what expert mindsets look like will help us get there faster?

Learning operates on two trajectories, incremental & transformational (figure below). We can acquire subject-area knowledge via incremental learning but “getting to expert” requires changing how we structure our knowledge. To change deep beliefs requires true experiential learning, through a series of critical developmental “lessons”.

Consider the series of experiential “jolts” that immersion into Startup Weekends provide: Upending, then rebuilding some very deep beliefs about what it means to be an entrepreneur.

[Note: This is equally true for other immersion & accelerator programs like TechStars, Founders Institute, Be Unreasonable and Y-Combinator, but I've been through SW.]

Critical Success Factors: Experiential Education

Immersion is one key to experiential learning because it forces you to let go of many deeply help assumptions… about entrepreneurship, about entrepreneurs, about ourselves. But the special sauce is having mechanisms to guide us. Expert mentors can help us learn the right ‘lessons’ of our experiences. But so can peer mentors (cooperative/collaborative learning has remarkable power). Is it any surprise that SW has such mindset-changing power?

Problem-based learning represents the best entrepreneurship learning. Rather than texts and homework, learners must solve messy, often ill-defined problems. I love how PBL lets me give students impossible problems and they rise to the occasion every time. And, along the way, they still acquire all the “textbook” knowledge. Forcing intent to become action makes all the difference. (Now you know why I love the SW/accelerator model!)

Finally, positive emotional engagement turns the madness of all this into a safe and fertile ground for dramatic changes in our deepest assumptions about entrepreneurship and…about ourselves.

Aren’t all of these exactly what programs like Startup Weekend provides?

So... what IF you stuck a Startup Weekender’s head in an MRI?[2]

So what ARE we learning in immersion programs like SW? (That we don't get in the usual "how to wrote a business plan" course?) What do we take away from the problem-based, peer-mentored/cooperatively-learned, expert-mentored, positively emotionally engaged immersion experience? As a cognitive developmental psychologist and neuroscientist -AND as an entrepreneur- here’s what I see.

Draw a Picture?

Imagine asking Startup Weekenders to draw us an “entrepreneur” – before and after. That mental model of “entrepreneur” is often going to change in fascinating directions – even for us ‘veterans’. In both Boise’s SWs, we had participants who really didn’t see themselves as an entrepreneur. Their mental models were limited at best and often flat wrong. Seeing the “light bulb” go on is a rush for this organizer... and their teammates and… themselves.

I consistently saw how participants’ mental models of what’s an “opportunity” go from “cool idea” to “I can do this”, from hypothetical to very real. They now perceived different barriers, more realistic & more likely action-oriented. (What’s really fun to see is that we come out of SW asking MUCH better questions. Here’s something I saw in both of Boise’s SWs: “Why can’t I find funding?”morphs into “How can I best qualify for funding?” (even better, “What kind of funding do I really need?” or "Do I even need external funding?")

And doesn’t all that sound like us accelerating toward a more expert entrepreneurial mindset? Learning. Without any “teaching”. That’s the genius of SW and programs like it.

My other favorite entrepreneurship education quote is from Epictetus:

“Experience is NOT what happens to you.
It is what you DO with what happens to you.”

In short: “Entrepreneur” is a verb. Startup Weekend and other programs like TechStars never let you forget that.

Thoughts?/nk

[i] Courtesy of Paul Hudnut, wizard of Colorado State’s awesome cross-campus program in commercializing sustainable technologies.

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[ii] For more neuroentrepreneurship & entrepreneurial learning, see http://bit.ly/9VyUJm & http://bit.ly/b6aUYq

Are gas prices dooming rural town --- or inspiring entrepreneurs??

An interesting - and perhaps chilling - article originally from the Kansas City Star that landed in the Idaho Statesman today:
http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/683605.html

The cost of gas is a huge threat to any situation that calls for commuting, especially lower wage jobs.... and one victim are rural communities. As the article suggests, this makes it all the more compelling to think entrepreneurship in rural Idaho. They quote Don Macke whose Center for Rural Entrepreneurship has developed a ton of powerful free tools that can be used -- they take a little training but there are two or three people already with this training & who could move this forward pretty quickly (some of you sat in on the Entrepreneurial Effect training while back).

There's also now an Entrepreneurship Development Committee in Region III chaired by Brandon Armstrong as paprt of Joe Herring's WIRED project; there's also of course the IRP's Entrepreneurship Task Force, chaired by Mike Field. In any event, isn't it time to start thinking more about this? Youth entrepreneurship is a good place to start - and we have started (like the IRP-backed H.S. entrepreneurship course this fall) and there are more opportunities we can explore right now (such as November's Global Entrepreneurship Week - more on that later!)

You'll find some additional useful resources on rural entrepreurship development at http://pronetos.com/disciplines/75 [thanks, Shane & Chris!] but read that article, whether linked here or in the Statesman.

Things may look bad - but the alchemy of entrepreneurship is turning threats into opportunities!

Optimistically yours,
Norris

Howdy - just back from the Research Triangle, North Carolina's legendary tech park (actually, attended the premier entrepreneurship research conference there)

One of their best take-aways is that it is both feasible & necessary to link rural economies with cutting edge innovation. It took them a while, but made it happen. Idaho should see this as encouraging evidence for what WE need to do!

Lots of insights about rural entrepreneurship - it remains the critical linchpin for smaller communities & it's still all about nurturing the mindset.

* People & Networks: You've got to grow entrepreneurial people, while developing & supporting the networks that nurture current & future entrepreneurs. Both formal & informal networking is vital.

* Thrive, Not Survive: It's also vital to move past "necessity" self-employment & help people to build businesses that thrive!

* Grrrl Power? Whether the US or the UK, your best indication that entrepreneurship is taking off in your community is how many women are starting businesses (again, not just self-employment)

Even more insights about growing tech-based entrepreneurship, too!
* Lots of buzz over Ohio's Third Frontier initiative - the latest bold stroke was negotiating a deal to spend $143 million to generate 26 new research centers (all have multiple universities & private sector leadership). For more details, please see: http://tinyurl.com/6oyjx2 .
The money allows them to hire 26 of the very, very best experts, one for each new program. [Ohio has about 8X our population, so if we scaled to Idaho's size this would be about $18 million & 3 new multi-university centers.]

These centers all focus on areas where Ohio already had great competitive strengths in both academic research and commercial success. They even got the universities themselves to pony up over $30 million of these new funds. [Again, in Idaho terms, that would be the same as each Idaho university diverting ~$4 million each of their existing research budget.]
More on that later, especially how that would work for Idaho & what it would take to make it happen. (But I promise there is reason to be optimistic!)

* Knowledge spillover, knowledge filter: Why do new firms create so many jobs? They are typically much better at turning ideas into practical value - we now have more & more evidence that it's the entrepreneurs & innovators that matter. You can always find ideas, you can't always find great people to put them into action.

* IdaVation Luncheon Keynoter: While we're at it - how many of you heard Brian Cummings, U of Utah's technology commercialization officer at IdaVation? Utah has spun out over 50 companies in less than 4 years, all but 3 are still viable. What Brian and his staff managed to do would be very difficult to imitate anywhere, including here in Idaho. However, I think it would be well worth the effort to overcome the obstacles.
Again, I'll write more later, but two of the keys were to keep the office under control of the experts. To do that, strategy and governance is led by the private sector. I'll be chatting more with Brian on the specifics & will report back. Again, there is much to be optimistic about, if we're willing to step up & do the smart things. (Note: Brian's office is more than self-supporting.)
(And, again, here too it is all about growing a truly expert entrepreneurial mindset - and what it takes to do that is well within our grasp!)

Also still the same...

The three keys to a more resilient, self-renewing local economy - our bona fide "no-brainers" that we still know how to do:

* Grow local entrepreneurs...everywhere you can
Train your potential entrepreneurs
Train your *existing *entrepreneurs

* Build capacity for communities & its members to grow entrepreneurs
Train citizens in "economic gardening"
Encourage entrepreneurial networks

* Start out early - youth entrepreneurship!
Grow the mindset in Idaho's youth

Till the next time, keep entrepreneuring!
Norris

Did you know the USA has over 100 self-made millionaires? ..... Under 14?

The #1 "no-brainer" for economic development is nurturing youth entrepreneurship.

Youth entrepreneurship training is associated with:

1) increased HS grad rates,
2) increase college attendance, and
3) an increased belief that there's a future for their hometowns.

Idaho as Best Practice?

One killer best practice for nurturing young entrepreneurs is the "Business Week" model. And Idaho Business Week is one of the best and director Vickie Horn is a passionate champion. For 30 years, it's provided an immersion experience for HS students that's a lot of fun (check the video at www.launchidaho.org!) AND provides a first-class introduction to what it takes to think entrepreneurially.

“Master Class” for Entrepreneurial Thinking

The key is to learn an entrepreneurial mindset - to think more like expert entrepreneurs do. We can teach kids (and adults) all about the tools they need. But it takes truly experiential learning, guided by experts, to grow that entrepreneurial mindset. Idaho Business Week's genuine problem-based learning delivers! (Think of IBW as a "master class" like even young musicians have.)

Key Piece of the Puzzle

Moreover, Idaho Business Week is an important piece of Idaho's puzzle. We have other mechanisms with more in the pipeline, but IBW adds a unique component. It's only real limitation is that it needs to be statewide. I would be remiss to not mention just some of the other pieces of Idaho's growing entrepreneurial efforts.

Earlier this month, I got to judge the finals of Invent Idaho at the Discovery Center, where Woody Sobey's program gets amazing inventions from 1st-8th graders... who all seem to understand the concept of the value proposition. The Idaho Rural Partnership's entrepreneurship task force under Mike Field is working on a distance-delivery course so any Idaho student can get world-class entrepreneurship training. Just this year, 4-H clubs now have a killer new program for their kids. And, yes, Junior Achievement is still out there doing well too. And this is just a few of the programs out there (apologies to the others!) However, none does what IBW does.

Or Why I'm Telling You This...

Idaho Business Week ain't cheap, folks. They heavily subsidize the participants, so anyone can attend regardless of circumstances, though distance is an issue, so Vickie is working to deliver IBW in 3 different spots (hosted by NNU, UI & CSI). To make IBW available across the state, Idaho Business Week needs to raise $110,000 ASAP. This is an investment in Idaho's future. [TechBoise.com graciously linked the full letter from IBW's Board.]

Please pass this along to friends, employers, and definitely the entrepreneurs you know! And even if you can't invest, will you drop Vickie an email of support? Or invite her to speak? (If you're an alumnus of IBW, she'd love to hear from you!) Vickie Horn's email is vickieh@iaci.org.

Entrepreneurially yours,
Norris Krueger, PhD
IRP entrepreneurship task force
(norris.krueger@gmail.com)