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Rodney Brooks
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William Green
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Richard Newton
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An Interview with:
Rodney Brooks, Ph.D.
Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at
MIT
William Green, Ph.D.
Senior Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of
Miami
Richard Newton, Ph.D.
Dean of the College of Engineering and the Roy W. Carlson Professor of
Engineering at the
University of California, Berkeley
In early 2006, the Kauffman Foundation commissioned the Kauffman Panel on
Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Education to create a comprehensive
approach to teaching entrepreneurship to college students. The nine Panel
members—a multidisciplinary group of distinguished scholars—sought to advance
entrepreneurship education at universities by creating a framework for its
development as a mainstream field of study.
To help colleges and universities form a complete curriculum devoted to
entrepreneurship, the Panel has developed plans to apply an innovative online
tool—the “wiki” model. Like the popular Wikipedia Web site, which provides a
free, easily accessible encyclopedia by pooling users’ contributions, the Panel
proposed an “Entrepedia” Web site in which a diverse community of educators
could participate in the formation and refinement of an entrepreneurship course
for college students.
Panel Chairman Richard Newton and panelists Rodney Brooks and William Green
discuss the Panel’s work and its importance.
Why have a Panel? What need does it fill?
Newton: I think entrepreneurship education has evolved over time
in the United States and throughout the world, but it’s still largely under the
radarscope. Entrepreneurship education falls into two distinct categories: the
academic study of entrepreneurship and the education one needs to become a more
successful entrepreneur. Many people have studied the abstract side of the field
and the entrepreneurial process. The Panel’s interest is the second category,
which includes people who will become entrepreneurs, people who support the
development of entrepreneurs, and the general public.
Brooks: The Kauffman Foundation sees the need for taking a
broader approach to entrepreneurship education, beyond just focusing on
technical entrepreneurship.
Why is entrepreneurship education important?
Newton: Most people believe much of the United States’ success
is due to its entrepreneurship culture. So anything we can do to enhance that
culture helps the United States regionally and nationally.
Brooks: Entrepreneurship has been the strength of the U.S.
economy for a long time. Over the last twenty-five years, we’ve
institutionalized the need for entrepreneurship. In 1981, the Bayh-Dole Act
empowered universities to obtain ownership of intellectual property that
resulted from federally funded research. That has allowed university faculty to
start companies. Over the same period, Wall Street has driven companies to push
on the bottom line. When the compensation of CEOs at large companies is tied to
earnings per share, it becomes harder for those companies to fund their own
research. It’s easier for them to buy smaller companies in order to acquire
research or technology. These developments make entrepreneurship education more
important than ever.
Green: Entrepreneurship is already a routine human behavior. But
it’s important for students to learn the difference that entrepreneurship
makes—for it to become a more routine subject of study and thought. If the goal
of education is to the make the world more intelligible, then entrepreneurship
education does that.
What is the Panel’s approach to improving entrepreneurship education?
Newton: We’ve made an analogy to music education. You can learn
to play music, make an instrument, or appreciate music. Similarly, you can learn
to become an entrepreneur, work with and advise those people who will become
entrepreneurs, or learn to appreciate entrepreneurship more fully as part of the
general public. These three levels require different education. The Panel is
looking at what’s been done in these areas—what has worked and what hasn’t
worked. By identifying best practices, we’re integrating all the existing
knowledge and experience to strengthen entrepreneurship education.
So students aren’t the only ones who will benefit as entrepreneurship
education evolves?
Newton: We’ve identified three fundamentally different
motivations that would affect the optimization of the course material on
entrepreneurship education. First, there are the needs and goals of the
individual student who wants to learn about entrepreneurship. Second, there is
the environment the student is in—the kind of businesses that surround the
student body at a given place. For example, entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley
is different from entrepreneurship practiced in Detroit in terms of networks,
resources, and approaches. Third, there are the goals of the collective
stakeholders in the process. Some want to launch start-ups. Others, such as big
corporations, want to educate their workforce better. We may also need to
educate, say, policymakers about entrepreneurship and lawyers about intellectual
property related to entrepreneurship. So this third dimension involves the
intended outcome of entrepreneurship education—the applied use of that
knowledge. Taken together, that’s the framework the Panel has established: the
cross-product of all three dimensions.
Why did you want to be on the Panel?
Newton: I’ve lived the entrepreneurial experience for thirty
years, first as a student of entrepreneurship, then starting design technology
companies such as Cadence Design Systems in 1982 and Synopsys in 1987. I’ve also
been a board member and advisor to such companies. But I’ve never stepped back
and looked at how to codify entrepreneurship education in an effective way. The
Panel is an ideal opportunity to think that through, and I’m learning a lot as I
do this.
Brooks: I’m interested in making sure students understand how to
be entrepreneurs so that they are not afraid of it. I often see fear in
students. Focusing more broadly on entrepreneurship education can address that
fear.
My interest is in how to convert the specific subject of entrepreneurship—how
to launch and build an enterprise—into a broader study of human activity. If we
understand entrepreneurship as a distinctive form of human agency—an activity
that involves ownership and the creation of ways to fill human needs—then the
Panel can advance this understanding. The more people can understand the
benefits of broad-based entrepreneurship, and what can undermine it, the more
educated our populace and the more positive consequences for our country.
What have you learned through your work with the Panel?
Newton: The Panel has reaffirmed that we cannot deliver
entrepreneurship education in a single textbook. There’s no one-size-fits-all to
the framework we’ve created. There isn’t a single curriculum we can circulate in
a single format. When we started this Panel, there was some thought that we
might put together a definitive textbook on entrepreneurship education. We’ve
concluded that’s not possible. Every course has to be customized.
Brooks: It has been interesting to think about entrepreneurship
education in settings that are nontraditional for me. For example, we’ve
explored what entrepreneurship is like in South Dakota. We’re rethinking how the
whole role of entrepreneurship fits across the country.
Green: I would not have predicted at the beginning that we’d
come up with the wiki. Once it was proposed, it made perfect sense. We all went
into this to present a canon of identified writings and books on
entrepreneurship education. But entrepreneurship is always changing, and we’re
learning that wiki is a great tool—a mode of learning that keeps the topic fresh
and can link people to valuable information.
How will the Panel’s proposed wiki model advance entrepreneurship
education?
Newton: We will use the wiki construct to create and post course
materials—content, homework assignments, references, etc.—in an online
environment so that anyone can integrate them and evolve them as they see fit.
Ultimately, this will allow faculty to construct a curriculum on
entrepreneurship that’s stitched together by the courses and other resources on
the site.
Green: The wiki is an example of the Panel providing lots of
resources with quality control to make entrepreneurship education ubiquitous to
help students. It’s exciting because it makes their education highly
interactive.
How do you think entrepreneurship education will change due to the Panel’s
work?
Newton: We hope the wiki creates a self-sustaining online
community in an open-source format so that it becomes a local, national, and
ultimately global source for anyone interested in learning about
entrepreneurship education. If ten years from now, the wiki has become a
powerful and widely sought source for entrepreneurship knowledge, then for me,
our work will have been successful.
Brooks: I’d hope that within engineering schools, there would be
more opportunities for students to be more fearless about going forward
as entrepreneurs.
Green: Entrepreneurship education will become more widely
accepted, a regular part of higher education. It’s already spilling over into
higher ed, but I think it will become a mainstream topic and the Panel can help
make that happen. Entrepreneurship will increasingly interact with other
curricular topics. Once a subject enters into the discourse, it results in a
larger discourse and a richer educational experience.
The Foundation lost a colleague, mentor, and friend on January 2, 2007, when
Rich Newton succumbed to cancer. Over the course of his thirty-year career, Rich
was a professor of electrical engineering, a founder of at least two
billion-dollar companies, a venture capitalist, and an outstanding dean of
engineering. We at the Foundation—and indeed, the thousands of people he touched
across the world—are better for having known Rich Newton. We will miss him
greatly.
This essay is an excerpt from the
Kauffman Thoughtbook 2007. To view a table of contents for the 2009 edition, or to order a printed copy of the publication,
please visit our 2009 Thoughtbook page 
