Innovate Or Perish
AUTHOR: Chris Sheedy DATE: 06.09.07 ISSUE 1, 2007
A vital initiative within the Australian School of Business is creating exciting educational and networking opportunities for students, entrepreneurs and corporate players.
In today's business environment, where outsourcing several crucial parts of the business process is par for the course, self-starters who are willing to risk failure or success on their own are necessities.
The new School of Strategy and Entrepreneurship is creating grooming process for the next generation of entrepreneurs. |
Entrepreneurs are important for the broader business landscape, but formal training for those who wish to follow the entrepreneurial road has been sorely lacking.
The Australian School of Business recognised this need and has responded with the creation of the School of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, headed by Associate Professor Peter Murmann.
The new School, along with an independent Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, directed by entrepreneur and venture capitalist Christopher Witt, have been established to build on the innovation and entrepreneurship programs already in place both in the Australian School of Business and within other faculties at UNSW.
It will also create powerful links between the academic community, student bodies and the business world via networking events, conferences, internships and research projects.
"There's going to be a mesh effect," says Mr Witt, founder and managing partner of The Kalori Group. "There will be a number of ways the corporate world will intersect with the student world. There will be a course work segment at undergraduate and graduate levels. We'll be intersecting with commercialisation bodies such as New South Innovations, the Australian Technology Park incubator and NICTA [a world-class research institute for information and communications technology]. There will be internships, a Meet The Entrepreneur event series and an Entrepreneur Opportunities Convention in 2008. The overall effect is to create a grooming process for the next generation of entrepreneurs.
"We have a number of pockets within the University, not just in the School of Business but also in the Faculties of Science and Engineering, which are very important nurseries for entrepreneurial activity," Mr Witt continues. "In these fields there are already some great things happening such as the Successful Innovations Program for PhD students in Engineering, and the Entrepreneurs of Science Program. We're going to add to and build on these great programs."
Mr Witt's enthusiasm for the project, and for the opportunities it will present to students and business people alike, shows no bounds. It is matched by Associate Professor Murmann's passion for bringing the power of academia to bear on an area that has previously been more about trial and error than solid, thoroughly-researched facts.
| "We will bring the commercial world closer to the students so the step from university to the commercial world is smaller," says Associate Professor Peter Murmann, Head of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Australian School of Business. |
Commercial connections
"MBA programs were created in the '60s and '70s to train people to be managers in large corporations, and while MBAs have changed with the times, we're bringing thorough entrepreneurial teachings and content directly into the MBA courses and other programs," Associate Professor Murmann says. "We're bringing together academics and practitioners to get the right mix. We want to create some frameworks and ideas which allow people to see the generality of experience, stripping away the details and seeing what is consistent and similar across several entrepreneurial experiences.
"On one level we'll be co-ordinating the existing entrepreneurship and innovation efforts of various faculties within UNSW to allow these activities to become more prominent, to build on one another," he says. "The second theme is to bring the commercial world closer to the students so the step from university to the commercial world is smaller."
Associate Professor Murmann explains that the increased need for, and importance of, the entrepreneur has occurred as a result of “deverticalisation”. Companies like General Motors used to own and manage every aspect of their business, from taking the raw materials out of the ground to building the car to servicing the vehicle long after it has left the showroom floor, he points out.
But in the last 15 years, as a result of globalisation and competitive pressures, companies have had to shrink and they now only take care of those parts of the value chain that they do better than anybody else. Everything that is not core is outsourced to external experts.
"Now you have specialist providers taking care of large parts of the value chain and this has opened up an enormous amount of entrepreneurial space," he says. "And the internet makes that space unlimited. There are a lot of opportunities for new ventures to work with corporations."
Mr Witt believes one of the great values of the new offerings will be the minimisation of defects, in other words an education that helps to ensure the entrepreneur makes as few mistakes as possible once they're in the real world. The well-trodden path of the entrepreneur need no longer be littered with expensive failed ventures.
| Christopher Witt, Director of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, has developed student-industry events such as 'Meet the Entrepreneur,' and will launch a major annual conference in 2008. |
As academics within the School work with entrepreneurs to analyse and break down their experiences, both positive and negative, the result will be a framework that allows students to think about things in a systematic way, avoiding the trial-by-error nature of entrepreneurship.
"Anyone who is working right now recognises that if you have not been to university the only way you learn is through your own mistakes or by watching somebody else's mistakes," Associate Professor Murmann says.
Networking know-how
On top of the obvious educational benefits of the new course offerings, Mr Witt is most excited about the networking opportunities that will develop as the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship makes its presence felt in the business world. The Meet The Entrepreneur events are a series of presentations by luminaries of the business world for students, alumni and corporate staff. A major annual conference, to be launched in 2008, will be open to anybody interested in the future of entrepreneurship.
The conference will be about opportunities in the world of entrepreneurship, Mr Witt explains. "For example, we'll be taking a step back and asking: what does the web mean for entrepreneurship? How does it affect industry? We'll look at major issues like climate change, which is something that creates opportunities as well as threats. We'll look at things from a business point of view and from an academic point of view and let the people at the forefront of entrepreneurship share the forum.
"As far as the course content goes, today we have 400 or 500 students with some degree of exposure to entrepreneurship studies, but by year two I think this will double and the exposure will be much more focused. We want to target the School of Business and the Schools of Engineering and Science, then to a lesser extent Law and Medicine," Mr Witt concludes. "I like to think of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship as advanced schooling for anybody who has chosen the life of the entrepreneurial adventure."