What I learned about teaching entrepreneurship from watching 14 seasons of Project Runway

What I learned about teaching entrepreneurship from watching 14 seasons of Project Runway (and 4 seasons of Project Runway Allstars, and one season of Under the Gunn, and reading all of Tim Gunn's books), OR What happens when the sun sets at 3 PM in Scotland OR How I learned to stop worrying and love skill-based reality competitions. Teaching entrepreneurship is a weird thing. There's not a huge amount of theory you can teach. Oh there is stuff about what is the nature of an opportunity or the role of personality characteristics, but I don't think many teachers or students think these are actually important to knowing about entrepreneurship. There are techniques to teach, like design thinking, customer empathy, and business model canvases, but it's hard to avoid teaching these in a way that isn't completely vocational. In a university class, I want students to develop critical thinking skills, not just know how to fill out a business plan template.

I think about it like teaching photography: there are technical skills to learn like f-stops, lighting levels, and colour coordination and there are things like the history of photography that students can engage with, but at the same time it is an art that can only be learned through repeated practice.

But while you can take a photo in 1/60th of a second, building a new venture takes a long time. We can try to simulate this with business plan assignments, but the problem with this is that it takes a long time (at the very least a good portion of a course) for students to figure out if a business model they're working on can work or the types of challenges they'll face.

So, we can't just practice entrepreneurship. I think a better approach is to help students develop good taste. Throughout Project Runway, Tim is trying to help the contestants become better designers by helping them become more tasteful. Often time this takes the form of 'editing,' taking away features of the clothes to reveal the brilliant design underneath. This isn't a rote list of what colors go together or what's fashionable this season: taste according to Tim Gunn is a highly creative and dynamic knowledge about what works in a given context given your resources, time frame, and customer needs.

Taste in entrepreneurship is similar. I think a business model can be beautiful if it opens up a path to create value where no one saw value before or identifies a solution to a problem everyone has but no one realises they have. Business models can also be ugly, like a model where you compete in a saturated market to provide a commodity service. A good business education should help students develop good entrepreneurial taste to realise what is a good opportunity and what is one to be avoided.

For Tim, the best way to teach taste is to ask questions. The teacher shouldn't say that there's no customers for a new product, they should ask who the customers are, what's the price point, what problem are they solving. A teacher shouldn't say that it's a bad idea to start a restaurant but instead make sure that the student can articulate their Unique Selling Point and then look for the holes in their argument. You're job is to be something of a speed bump, making sure that you don't let students get to carried away with their own ideas that they don't look at it from different perspectives to see the flaws.

Good teaching is always good mentorship, but mentorship is especially important when trying to cultivate taste in students. It's helping students to understand what questions they need to ask and to understand what a good idea sounds like.

Drawing on my now very extensive experience of watching Project Runway, I've come up with a few tips on cultivating entrepreneurial taste that I'm going to try to work into my classes:

• Identify beautiful business models and share them with students. Try to explain what makes the business model beautiful: does it uncover a new source of value (like AirB&B), does it try something totally new and unexpected (like leasing jeans), does it do something that's already out there but just much better (like Slack)?
• Ask questions, lots of questions. Make students re-think every aspect of their idea to find the weaknesses.
• Use silence. If the student can't immediately answer a question, don't just skip it and move on, just sit there until they can answer it. If they can't, then they sure know that they have to figure out how to answer it now.
• Don't do the work for them. One of the biggest challenges mentors face is not to just jump in when you see a student struggling (look at the first season of Under the Gunn to see what that looks like) and help them out. But struggling is part of the learning process. Make sure you're not just giving them ideas, but you're helping them come up with their own ideas.
• Force them to road test. No plan survives contact with reality but road testing an idea is the only way to see if it works. Figure out way to make students take their ideas out of the class room and into the real world. Make them come up with £5 experiments (a market validation test that costs less than a really good cup of coffee) and then talk with them about the results.
• Be empathetic. Tim Gunn is the world's best mentor because he deeply empathises with all his students, no matter what their background. He's good at teaching because his students instantly know that he cares about their success. That way even when he's forcing them to start all over on a 12-hour design question, they know he's doing it because he believes they can do better.

A blessing of unicorns.

Three facts: a herd of unicorns is called a blessing, Scotland's national animal is the unicorn, and a unicorn can also mean a startup valued at over 1 billion USD.Given these facts, it was pretty much impossible not to title my recent talk on Edinburgh's entrepreneurial ecosystem "A Blessing of Unicorns." You can see the slides from the talk here

Edinburgh is a very strange entrepreneurial ecosystem. On a per capita basis, it has the third highest number of unicorns in the world, more than New York City, Berlin, and Bejing and behind only Silicon Valley and Provo, Utah.

For the past few months I've been carrying out a study of Edinburgh's entrepreneurial ecosystem. I recently published a white paper summarizing my initial findings, which you can read here [PDF warning]. I was primarily looking at the role of entrepreneurship support programs in helping to create a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Support programs, often run by the public sector, are a crucial part of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. They help correct for the market failures that often face early stage companies: entrepreneurs may have great vision and technology, but they'll always experience trouble convincing investors and customers of this. Programs can help entrepreneurs by providing them with training, grants, and help build their social networks to connect with other entrepreneurs and advisors.

I identified 43 different entrepreneurship support programs in Edinburgh. These ranged from large, publicly funded programs organized by Scottish Enterprise and Scotland-wide business plan competitions like the Converge Challange to smaller programs put on by local entrepreneurs, such as coffee meetups and organized drink nights. This is by any account a conservative estimate, almost every week I hear about a new program that just started up or an existing one that had slipped under my radar.

I interviewed the leaders of 26 of these programs to get a better sense of what they do and who they work with. The most interesting finding was how tightly networked all these programs are. As you can see below, this is a really, really dense network of support programs. There are almost no isolated programs with none or just one connection to other programs.

What does this mean? What I observed in Edinburgh was that individual programs were able to specialize in providing specific types of support to specific types of entrepreneurs. This can be helping early stage biotech entrepreneurs network with potential investors or organizing startup competitions for student entrepreneurs. As entrepreneurs change, the the leaders of support programs can connect them with other programs that provide more relevant services. This is only possible given the strong connections between programs. Allowing programs to specialize mean that they can provide more material support for a small subset of entrepreneurs rather than being everything for everyone.

What does this mean for Edinburgh's ecosystem? On one hand, it's a good thing. Lots of programs mean that entrepreneurs can pick programs that provide the right resources and support for them without having to endure generic programs that aren't very relevant to them.

However, I'm a bit concerned that the Scottish Government has a bit too much power in creating and running these support programs. In my study, about 80% of the programs I interviewed got their funding in some way through either Scottish Enterprise or another Scottish Government funding body. One of the defining characteristics of an entrepreneurial ecosystem is that it is primarily run by and for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs themselves should be identifying their needs and helping to create organizations to deal with the issues they encounter. The role of the government should be to sit back and support the entrepreneurs doing this. Otherwise the state risks investing resources in areas that aren't affecting entrepreneurs. Programs like StartEDIN are great examples of entrepreneurs coming together to identify common problems and working towards solutions. This should be encouraged rather than crowded out through public investment.

Kicking students out to get their work visas: Bad idea or worst idea?

The great thing about the end of the year, other than my birthday (better known as Christmas 2) is that governments try to release all their crazy policies while everyone is off enjoying the 'festive season' (better known as getting drunk). So I wasn't that surprised when I read that the Home Office is developing a new strategy of forcing all non-EU foreign students to leave the country before applying for a work visa. Let's discuss why this is a terrible idea. A university helps the regional and national economy by bringing in promising pupils, educating them, helping them gain technical and social skills, and then unleashing them on the economy as workers and entrepreneurs.One of the biggest economic contributions universities make to their surrounding regions is to attract and train skilled workers. All the cool research and 'academic spinoffs' are just added gravy, the true benefit comes from developing wicked smart kids.  Immigration policy should do its best to create pathways for foreign students trained in domestic universities to stay in the country. Universities aren't economic engines, their alumni are.

I also think that forcing a 4-month trip home would break the link between the student, the university, and the region. Let's imagine the optimum situation here: a brilliant student graduates and leaves the country to apply for a work permit. She has to give up her flat, sell or store all her furniture, and then move back with the parents. She goes out and applies for jobs and because she is brilliant, gets many offers and gets a work permit after about 120 days. Right there the university's home region has lost it's best claim to the student: she already lives there. Sure lots of students move after finishing university, but many students (particularly post grads) also set down roots in a place that encourages them to look for local work. This is especially true for entrepreneurs or people who want to work at startups who depend on their place-based social networks to find opportunities and jobs. This policy change will break these networks and bonds for every single non-EU student.

Second, it's pretty much admitting that the sole purpose of international students is to subsidize domestic students' tuition. I'm an international student / worker twice over: I'm an American but I did my undergrad and PhD in Canada and now I'm a migrant worker in the UK. As a student I knew that I was paying more than my Canadian friends, but at least I knew that Canada had some interest in keeping me after my studies. Maybe not as an undergrad (for some reason economic geographers aren't in demand in the Canadian labour market) but my PhD came with a permanent residency application stapled to it. I think changing the rules to basically say "thanks for the money, now why don't you go home and cool your heels for a few months while we decide if you can come back." would really change my view towards the university and the country.

Look, we all know that this change is being done for political reasons leading up to an election. Some idiots made an idiotic promise to minimize net immigration. But it's also important that every single idiotic consequence of these idiotic plans are raised and that the backers of these plans are forced to explain their rationales to a sceptical public.

Innovation districts should be like bamboo, not mushrooms

Bruce Katz and Julie Wagner at the Brookings Institute just put out a new thought piece on innovation districts — concentrated urban areas designed to foster innovation, entrepreneurship, knowledge sharing and creativity. This is an interesting mix of existing thinking about how the economic growth engine of developed economies are shifting from suburban office parks to urban cores, studies on cluster development and knowledge spillovers, and architectural and environmental psychology thinking about how the built form influences interaction and knowledge sharing. Innovation districts are different than the traditional idea of clusters. Clusters are about a whole region, from the suburban periphery to the downtown core, to the other downtown core, to the highway strip malls that are become a new form of office space. Innovation districts are much smaller, the authors through out numbers like 200-1000 acres, and much more focused on the assets needed to support high-tech innovation (wet labs, office space, collaboration areas, 3D printers because everything is 3D printers right now).

The report does a very good job of making clear that innovation districts aren't just physical facilities. The authors cite three kinds of assets: economic assets, networking assets, and physical assets. Economic assets are the existing firms and institutions that drive innovation, network assets are the linkages between these economic assets and the individual employees that actually generate the innovation, and physical assets are the infrastructure in which all this tasty innovation happens within.

However, I'm a bit concerned about the idea that innovation districts are a solution to specific problems, such as low levels of innovation or a failure for the knowledge produced within a university or anchor firm to effectively spillover to others in the area. Just like when I try to bake, just having all the ingredients together in one place doesn't mean that you'll make something delicious.

The recent controversy over MaRS in Toronto is instructive. MaRS is a government sponsored facility in downtown Toronto, right next to the University of Toronto and its many research hospitals. Its mission was to support and incubate spinoff companies from university research and provide a space for satellite offices and labs of major pharma companies to capitalize on knowledge spillovers. It failed. Despite the copious efforts put in to entrepreneurial support, there are few if any startups in it and it the facility poised to default on its bonds because it's new lab space don't have any tenants. Despite the fact that Toronto has the physical, economic, and network assets to support this kind of work, the innovation district never really emerged.

What this means is that innovation districts can't just be plomped down in a city and expected to work. Now, that's a bit of a stawman argument: very few policy makers think they're playing Sim City where they can just right click, add a new feature, and expect it to seamlessly integrate with the physical and economic landscape of the city. But there does seem to be a belief that one last public investment — a new incubation facility or a collabatorium — will finally bring together all the great urban and regional innovative resources that are currently unconnected.

Let's call that outlook the 'mushroom model.' Mushrooms seem to popup right after a nice summer rain: the water activates the existing resources in the environment (I'm no mycologist here. I'm just a guy who notices that mushrooms seem to spring up after a rain). This suggests that the physical form of the innovation district can unlock the existing potential of an innovative region.

I think a 'bamboo' model is better. Bamboo is a rhizome, a root system that sometimes sends up shoots to gather energy and produce flowers to reproduce. (note: apparently poison oak is also a rhizome, but that wouldn't make as catchy a title). The heart of the bamboo is the roots, not the shoots.

An innovation district should be like bamboo: it's physical form should reflect a strong root system of innovation, interaction, knowledge sharing, and entrepreneurship. The physical form of the innovation district should be the embodiment of the innovation, not the catalyst.

But there's the rub. Unlike bamboo shoots, new university collaboration centres, lab space, or incubation programs just don't appear overnight because the conditions are favourable. They require massive public investment and years of planning. How is a policy maker to decide if an investment in a new facility reflects an existing innovative undercurrent or if she is just trying to add a bit of water in the hopes that a new mushroom pops up.

I obviously don't have the answer to that, but part of the process is casting a critical eye on the region's innovative culture. You need to take a serious look at the pre-existing levels of interaction between firms, researchers, and entrepreneurs. Is there a culture that supports interaction and learning for their own sake, or are they just showing up to networking events for the free wine?

Entrepreneurship and Independence

I just got back from the Independence and Entrepreneurship debate hosted by the University of Edinburgh Business School and MBM Commercial. It was a great event! This is such an interesting and important topic, and I'm glad that over 400 people were willing to spend an evening listening and thinking about it. Now that I'm back home with my scotch and my Game of Thrones, I've got a few thoughts on it. 1) I was somewhat disappointed by the composition of the panel. 6 people: 1.5 entrepreneurs, 3.5 economists / financial policy folk (one was half economist and half entrepreneur) and one MSP. Because of this, discussions of entrepreneurship took a back seat to discussions of fiscal policy. Not that those points aren't important, but that they're not entirely relevant to entrepreneurs. I was also disappointed that there were no women on the panel. Women make up about 40% of the owners of new firms. I was disappointed their voices weren't heard tonight.

2) The elephant in the room is that policy and tax regimes really don't really affect entrepreneurs. As I said in the last post, I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and not a one has mentioned being swayed by a small change in the marginal tax rate or the introduction of a new innovation policy. No one seemed to answer which UK policies are holding entrepreneurs back and which future Scottish policies could foster it.

3) Buuuuuuuut.......currency does matter. The panelists suggested that the costs of currency transactions between some future Scottish pound and the Pound Sterling would add about 1% to firm costs. I think this is a bit low when we're talking about smaller firms, who will bear the brunt of cross-boarder transactions. But, I honestly don't think it will come to that. This is the one question that really matters for entrepreneurs, but it' the one question that will not be answered before the vote.

Declining Entrepreneurship in the US: Fact, Fiction or Some Third Thing?

Ian Hathaway and Robert Litan at the Brookings Institute just came out with an interesting working paper showing that new business creation and entrepreneurship in the US has been declining since the 1970s [PDF warning]. Since people at Brookings know how to write a good paper for public consumption, the lede is right there in Figure 1.

And also since the Brookings Institute is really good a press releases, this report has been part of today's twitter tales. Plenty of people are blaming this on OABAMA, OBAMA TAXES, and OBAMA REGULATIONS.

I don't doubt the author's analysis, but entrepreneurship data is tricky, tricky stuff. I've spent far too many hours yelling at my excel spreadsheets, wondering why they don't add up, only to realize I was using the wrong definition.

What's a startup? What's a new firm? Are we talking about every new firm registered with the IRS? Firms that have incorporated with their Secretary of State? What about firms that have more than nominal turn over? Firms who employ more than just the founder? Are we counting farms? Franchises?

There are a lot of reasons why aggregate levels of entrepreneurship would fall over time. As much as I am loath to blame regulations (in the over 100 entrepreneurs I've interviewed as part of my research, I don't think any have ever mentioned regulations as a major challenge), but it's not like there are fewer building codes out there than in 1970. The idea that slightly higher marginal federal tax rates discourage entrepreneurs (who are unlikely to make a profit during the term of the president who raised or lowered the taxes) is such a stupid idea that it doesn't even merit a clever joke.

Rather, I think there are fewer opportunities for entrepreneurs out there. A Wal-mart in town means that there's no need for the local 5 and Dime, the appliance shop (and now that TVs are so cheep, no need for the TV repair shop). Now, consumer facing small businesses are only a small part of the overall entrepreneurial scene. But, it's hard to ignore the fact that major firms and franchises are able to out compete most independent entrepreneurs in the same field. McDonalds franchise owners work hard, but they have a lower failure rate than any independent restaurant.

The authors say they've got another paper in progress that'll control for external economic factors and that the decline in entrepreneurship survives the addition of control variables. But something like this doesn't show up in any econometric variable I know of. It represents a structural change in the economy.

How to measure entrepreneurial ecosystems

I love reading data-driven articles on entrepreneurial ecosystems, and Nick Beim's new article "The Rise and Future of The New York Startup Ecosystem" is no exception. What's unique about it is that is uses two measures, total amount of VC investment and exists about 500 million,  to compare ecosystems. Nick shows that while NYC's ecosystem might still be small by Silicon Valley terms, it's the same size as as Boston (if not bigger) despite the fact that NYC lacks a high profile research university like  MIT (Colombia stands in the corner of the room and looks at the floor in embarrassment; no one even notices NYU).

Both these metrics are nice because they give us real, comparable numbers. Comparing regions is always a difficult process because of a lack of good, comparable data that actually talks about entrepreneurship specifically.

However, there are some problems with these measures. VC isn't geographically neutral: venture capitalists tend to invest in firms near them (I could give you so many citations for this but just throw 'venture capital geography' into google scholar and go wild). So, places with more VC firms are likely to have more VC investments. This is called a 'Matthew Effect,' meaning that places with an already existing advantage continue to get that advantage at the expense of worse off places. So, places with lots of existing VC investment will attract more VC firms, leading to higher levels of investment. Now, this isn't deterministic: New York-based venture capital firms are increasingly investing in firms in Toronto and Ottawa. Two venture funds just put over 100 million into Ottawa's Shopify last year. Similarly, without this kind of financial backing, it's hard to get a $500 million + exit.

Because of this, there are maybe 5-10 cities in America where we'd expect to see enough venture capital invested to actually put the data in a spreadsheet and make a pretty graph with out resorting to logging everything.  But I think that there are more than 10 entrepreneurial ecosystems in America. We need to find better metrics that allow us to identify them in ways that go beyond VC investments and exist.

However, this means a lot more work on the part of researchers. It's easy to get VC data if you're willing to pay; it's much harder to figure out the contours of a regional culture or count how many mentors there are within a community. This requires a more in-depth, case study approach. I'm just beginning to think about how we can measure ecosystems in a way that gets at all these hidden factors but at the same time allows us to systematically compare different regions.

One last note: Nick's article is particularly nice because it actually mentions cost of living. Major ecosystems like NYC, Boston, and San Fran are having a cost-of-living crisis. It's going to become increasingly hard for entrepreneurs, especially young ones, to actually live and work in these places. How entrepreneurs support themselves prior to being bought by Facebook for 19 billion dollars is going to become an increasingly important question as time goes on.

Freedom for Silicon Valley! Freedom From Silicon Valley!

Reading Gawker's Silicon Valley / Silicon Alley gossip blog ValleyWag is one of my favourite diversions from reading research about Silicon Valley / Silicon Alley. There isn't enough critical thought about its growing bubble economy and its brogrammer environment. A talk (non-TED, thankfully) by a Stanford lecturer about how The Valley must get around government restrictions and red tape is emblematic of this lack of critical thought and reflection. Entrepreneur / lecturer Balaji Srinivasan called for the need to build "opt-in society, outside the US, run by technology."

I'll admit that I wasn't in the talk (I'm in sunny, warm Edinburgh), but it strikes me that this kind of thought is part of a larger techno-libertarianism that's been a popular feature of the technology industry since the very start. This viewpoint generally sees new technology and innovation as an unalloyed good and anything that gets in the way of new technology (skeptical investors, government regulators, liberal arts majors,  Underwriters Labs) as a barrier at best and an evil at worst. The increasing fetishization of Disruption With a Capital D, especially for disrupting urban life through things like Uber (the car sharing / unregulated taxi business) or AirBnB (the room sharing / cheep hotel service) is a major component of this.

But this movement is largely ahistorical. The desire for Silicon Valley to secede from government regulations is ahistorical, ignoring the critical role of the US government in the creation of Silicon Valley. One of the best histories of this traces the development of Silicon Valley to the establishment of military bases in the 1910s. Even if we don't go back that far, the emergence of the original transistor economy in the region wouldn't have existed without federal support of the original research and as one of the main buyers. Today, 83% of Stanford's research budget comes from public sources.

Utopianism is important: it allows us to envision a better world and then (rarely) take steps to create that world. But utopias are literal (well, figurative) no-places. They cannot be real. There will never be a entrepreneurial ecosystem or innovation hub that exists outside the presence of public investment in education, research or infrastructure and without government procurement. Yes, that means there will never be a (successful, non-norovirus infected) floating tech utopia or Reddit Island.

World Weary Waterloo Waits and Wonders: When Will RIM's Worries Wane?

First, apologies for the lack of posts here. Since the last post, I've moved my entire life to Edinburgh and started a new job in the University of Edinburgh Business School. I've started an experiment in using Tumblr to make short comments on interesting articles about culture, entrepreneurship. I'll eventually find some way to integrate the two. Second, thing are....um....not going well for Blackberry (ńee RIM). Losses of almost a billion dollars in the last quarter, reports of planned layoffs of 40% of the workforce, disappointment and delays on new products, this has not been a great week for the Beleaguered Smartphone Company©.

At this point, it seems likely that recovery is unlikely at best and that RIM (sorry, not calling it Blackberry) will cease to be an independent company at some point in the near future. This may take the form of a complete selloff to a private equity firm or someone in the smartphone industry or the spinoff and selling off of the remaining profitable areas (Blackberry OS, BBM and the cafeteria?).

The question for me, even on the other side of the Atlantic is: what does this mean for Waterloo's entrepreneurial ecosystem and culture? While the 4500 cut jobs will take place around the world, there's no debate that many, if not most, will be in Waterloo.  RIM, along with the University of Waterloo, are seen as the twin pillars of the region's entrepreneurial community.  The presence of a home grown startup that became a global force is a vital narrative in the community: it shows the possibilities of entrepreneurship and the potential rewards of leaving a stable job for the risks of starting your own company.

As I've said before, Ottawa after the collapse of Nortel is the easiest comparison, but I don't think Waterloo will suffer the same fate. After Notel began it's long decline, there was an initial exodus of skilled workers out of the region in search of other jobs. Other highly skilled engineers stayed in the region due to family ties or the fact that they actually liked living there (?!). These people looked for jobs where they could and turned to entrepreneurship, mostly as small time consultants, when they couldn't find a place in another big company or the government.

Waterloo can expect a different kind of exodus. It's proximity to Toronto (an hour on the 401) means that people can stay in Waterloo but become highway warriors and work in offices in Mississagua or Oakville. It's not a pleasant drive, but it's doable. Many major companies like Microsoft and Google already have large Toronto offices and will look to scoop up some of RIM's talented engineers. We're already seeing reports of smaller firms opening up Waterloo offices, I'm sure with the hope of picking up laid off cell phone engineers and programers as well. 

It's also likely that many of the region's economic development programs like Communitech, will try to help the recently laid off workers become entrepreneurs. The logic is seductive: take the experienced human capital of RIM workers, combine it with the social capital and experience of the region's talented entrepreneurial mentors, and help create new, high-tech businesses.

However, it's a mistake to see this as the Great Hope of economic recovery. RIM is an interesting beast: it's a major part of the discourse and legend of Entrepreneurial Waterloo (along with the Mennonites and the Germans), but the company itself seems to discourage entrepreneurship. I can only think of one spinoff from RIM, KIK Messenger, and RIM sued them! Similarly, very few people leave RIM and start their own firms. In my extensive interviews in the region, I only heard of one person who did so (the aforementioned KiK). This is to say that people who have been working at RIM may not want to be entrepreneurs. They want to be people who design high quality cell phones and messaging infrastructure that works a lot of the time, and leave the dirty work of actually running a company to someone else.

The same thing happened with Ottawa and the ex-Nortel workers. The dreams of seeing startups escape the bloated caucus of Nortel like so many baby spiders in a nature documentary never happened. But the region kept on promoting this kind of entrepreneurship without a second thought.

If Waterloo wants to make the best out of a bad situation, they need to figure out a way to help the soon-to-be laid off RIM workers. Entrepreneurship training is a big part of this, but it's not the only part. The community should be working to convince other high-tech companies to take advantage of this situation and open local offices to snatch them up. The local government needs to work with its provincial and federal counterparts to try to encourage Canadian firms in the region to expand their operations to take them on. Despite the region's celebration of entrepreneurship, it shouldn't see entrepreneurship as the only way forward.

Well, that was quick.

  I'm mostly posting this here so I can find it again in the future. This is like classroom discussion gold.

Maybelline is already Occupy Wall Street themed ads. What ever you might think about capitalism, it will adapt to anything.

A quick thought

I don't want to do many of these short questions designed only to provoke, but I'm reading the Steve Jobs biography and it's hard not to feel somewhat philosophical. Here it is. There is only one question that matters when studying the geography of entrepreneurship: If John and Clara jobs had not moved back from Wisconsin in 1952, would Steve Jobs be The Steve Jobs, or would he be the best used car salesman that northwestern Wisconsin had ever seen?