University Entrepreneurship May Be Failing Its Market Test

Abstract

of industry “best practices” to improve the performance of any organization, including how to improve the innovative capacity of a profit-seeking firm. For the uninitiated, this concept is as simple as its name suggests. To improve your company’s performance, you look for the organization that does something better than everyone else and then copy it. If Procter & Gamble runs its packing line better than you do, by all means, copy its practice. Such thinking may be a reason we are concerned about the slowing rate of innovation in America. If today’s best practice is the standard for emulating, do any firms feel comfortable out on some “better than best” frontier? The very notion of “best practices” suggests the acceptance of a grand average. Except, of course, for those firms that are deemed the best practitioners of “innovation.” In a recent book, Inside Real Innovation, Gene Fitzgerald and Andreas Wankerl and I argue that most older and larger firms forget how to innovate, a finding suggested long ago by Max Weber. Perhaps this is why we have, over the last three decades, intuitively embraced entrepreneurship as a way to bring more innovation to our economy. Indeed, as I have detailed elsewhere, it was the resurgence of entrepreneurial capitalism in the 1980s that got us out of the prolonged recession that characterized the Carter years. But the word “entrepreneurship” is beginning to sound a little like the concept of best practices—a phrase that is valued for its inchoate sense of being logical and a self-evidently valuable pursuit. What we mean when we speak of entrepreneurship appears to evade definition. Of course, entrepreneurship is connected to creating new profit-seeking firms. That’s what might be called the conventional or