On Being Scared

Just finished the keynotes for this morning. While they were all interesting and intriguing, the final keynote presented by Steve Blank was incredibly good.

Blank is a professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford and Berkley and he told 4 stories of entrepreneurial success vs. failure. The four stories revolved around decisions that impacted the tech sector in the early days of Silicon Valley. The talk was quite inspired and informational and I think the value that I found in it has more to do with an epiphany, of sorts, that both Gamage and I had immediately following.

The "powers that be" at Stanford are not scared. This has allowed for the recruitment of faculty and students who are willing to embrace that idea and push the gamut. One prime example is Fred Turman who is truly the father of Silicon Valley. As a professor of engineering who specialized in radio, Turman did various things for the NSA/CIA during WWII. The one thing that was most impressive, though, was that he came back to Stanford and told his faculty and students to take all of the intellectual property they wanted and start companies in Palo Alto. They did and thus was born Silicon Valley.

How many other universities would be willing to do something like that? How many would allow the absolute control of intellectual assets to leave their hallowed halls and be built into businesses?

Stanford continues to allow some of the greatest minds to express their creativity into failure, failure, failure, success, 100s of times over. Ge Wang is a prime example of this. Smule (Ge and other faculty/students at Stanford began this company) is a company that is making millions of dollars through the sale of the iPhone/iPad music apps they have built. It is institutions like Stanford, that allow their faculty and students to harness the full potential of their creativity without fear of reprisal that are leading the new revolutions in techno-media.

Many institutions are always afraid to allow intellectual property to leave their control. The fear grows exponentially when the economy begins to fail and Federal/State funds find their way to the chopping block. Many institutions are forced to compromise the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of their faculty/staff/students because of regulations that have been put in place by a government that just doesn't get it. It's not always at the Federal or State level, though. Even at the institutional level we find political factions that, purposefully or not, stifle the creative and entrepreneurial spirit. Whether it's by requiring a democratized design on a print or web piece, or whether it's by utilizing power and status to bully people into one individual's way of thinking, the entrepreneurial spirit is crushed.

Are there niche areas within our institutions that foster and grow creativity and entrepreneurial spirit? Yes. Unfortunately, it's not an institution-wide phenomenon and many times, it's almost done in secret.

KSRE and Research and Extension in general have come under fire lately for not being valid or viable as 21st century leaders in the different fields they engage in. I strongly disagree. I have many friends within KSRE as well as RE at other universities who are amazingly creative, but because of the economy and ultimately the fear of the possibility of losing their job, have decided that it's more prudent to work within a known quantity. Because of fear, their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit is hidden behind maintaining the status quo of having to constantly validate what they do so that the State or whomever will see that they are a valuable asset to the organization.

If we are to survive and grow, we need to rethink the status quo. Perhaps it's time to look at ways to bend the rules and rebel against those who would seek to stifle. Perhaps it's time for a revolution. Perhaps it's time to stop being afraid.