Top universities and entrepreneurship
I’ve been a bit behind with my reading and have only just got to an article in Business Week entitled Who Needs the Ivies which asks whether top universities (the ‘Ivies’ in the title - meaning the Ivy League universities in the US - which the author bundles with other powerhouses such as MIT and Stanford) discourage entrepreneurship by tending towards risk-aversion and the continuation of the status quo.
I find this interesting (partly because I was at Cambridge, Tom was at Warwick and Duncan was at Glasgow - each of which are great universities). We have entrepreneurial ambitions - and this isn’t the first suggestion that our educations could potentially actually be a hindrance. I was struck while reading Rachel Bridge’s book how I made it how many of the case studies were about people who hadn’t been to university (many left school before A levels).
In some ways, there is a reporting bias at work here - sometimes the most interesting case studies are those where the subject has overcome particular difficulties.
I suspect that the truth is somewhat more complicated - I don’t know whether higher education is an indicator of likely entrepreneurial success or not, but I do think that it is probably a smaller factor than a lot of other things.
Maybe it is rare to have a combination of entrepreneurial drive and the kind of analytical approach to things that gets you a degree in computer science or maths from a top university. But I guess what we are hoping is that we have that combination, and that when it happens, it’s really powerful.
Here’s hoping.
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Adam on Wed (26 Sep) @ 7:52 pm
I think you’re talking about me
Ha jokes - but we’ll see how I’m doing in three years, after the degree!
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Will Critchlow on Thu (27 Sep) @ 3:42 pm
Hi Adam. I think there’s a good chance I might be talking about you, yes…
Good luck with your course. I like your blog btw - particularly the post about Tesco’s advertising. That’s unbelievable (almost - actually I can believe it all too easily…).
Stay in touch.
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Adam on Thu (27 Sep) @ 4:28 pm
Thanks Will. I shall stay in touch (or at least keep reading the blog)!
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Will Critchlow on Thu (27 Sep) @ 5:39 pm
Good enough for me
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Bill Hilton on Fri (28 Sep) @ 4:03 pm
I did a joint press release with my old university the other day - I won’t show off by naming it, but suffice to say it’s one of the UK Big Three (Oxford, Cambridge and Bangor). The press office is currently bigging up self-employment and business links among their graduates, and they thought I was the ideal example, not least because I could write the release and save them the bother.
Anyway - to get to the point - one of the facts I dug up was that every year in the UK, 7000 people become self-employed right after they graduate. Obviously, that figure’s going to include a certain number of people who become self-employed by the nature of their work - barristers, for example. But it’s still a ton of people: equal to the complete yearly output of a couple of medium-sized universities.
The number is supposed to be growing, and although I don’t have a breakdown of the stats it’s pretty clear it’s being driven by the tech sector.
It’s interesting, because I’ve always thought the people most likely to succeed in business are those who are bright, but not super-clever, and certainly not intellectual. My lazy, pop-psychology justification for this would be that successful entrepreneurs meed to be incredibly focussed, while very bright and educated people often suffer ‘paralysis of analysis’ - they spend so long looking at a problem that their less smart competitors, who actually act, get there first.
It’s also a concentration thing. Business involves quite a lot of work that’s quite dull - very smart people often find boredom intolerable.
…oo, look - there’s a pigeon on the roof…