10 August 2014

"Corporate entrepreneurship and innovation will be the next big thing for the next 10 years" - Steve Blank

Steve Blank recently said,

Corporate entrepreneurship and innovation will be the next big thing for the next 10 years, and the business school that sets up a program for that will be printing money from executive education and gradating a cadre of MBAs who will be snapped up by large companies that are desperate to reintroduce innovation inside their corporations.
Are any business schools making strides in corporate innovation? Corporate innovation is something that’s coming down the pipe. But I haven’t seen a business school that has understood that this is a big idea. The first couple that do will own the space. It’s wide open. We’re going to have a great time in the next five to 10 years.
This is a huge opportunity and unmet need – business schools haven’t pivoted yet. Now they’re getting the startup innovation courses right, but corporate innovation is a lot more complicated, and the startup techniques and classes don’t apply. There has been very little literature and research on the subject. 
I find this affirming because Blank has been ahead of the curve for probably a decade and the fact that he's seeing the need to make corporations more entrepreneurial aligns with the ideas I've been advocating for decades.

I think that the popularization of entrepreneurship is going to transform the corporation because so many of us are employees now. We couldn't leave knowledge work to autodidacts last century and we can't leave entrepreneurship to the innovative few outside of corporations in this.

Some people are beginning to understand that entrepreneurship will lead development now the way that capital did in the 19th century or the way that knowledge work did in the last. I'm still not hearing much about how that will transform business, but if people aren't talking about that, they still don't fully understand what we're facing. Popularizing entrepreneurship within the corporation will transform it as much as mutual funds and credit cards transformed finance and as much as democracy transformed the nation-state.

Market Economy
Period
Big Social Transformation
Where Power is Dispersed
First, Agricultural
1300 to 1700
Religion
Church
Second, Industrial
1700 to 1900
Politics
Nation-state
Third, Information
1900 to 2000
Finance
Bank & Financial Markets
Fourth, Entrepreneurial
2000 ~
Business
Corporation

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Totally right! I´m reading your book and chapter after chapter i wonder how this book is not being a study text in every school, college and company!!!

Are you writing more currently?

gabby57 said...

It would be nice if business schools would make strides towards innovation. It would also be nice if they didn't fill up graduating requirements with non-degree related courses.

A study of the degree requirements for a ivy league business school found nearly half of the requirements for graduation were not business related course.

There were a good number of electives within the business school that were not available unless one wanted to add more time and debt(?).

As someone who recruits and evaluates graduates from time to time, it would be nice if their backgrounds had a little more learning and experience in fields what we are looking for.