I now find myself in a university campus laboratory just outside Dublin. I call it a ‘garden of entrepreneurship’ in which start-ups with high expectations of growth are cultivated: plants from seeds that are different from those sown by the entrepreneurs who manage companies that remain small due to isolation and the inability to grow through networking. These start-ups provide employment and productivity. In the USA, they account for twice the percentage of new companies compared to Europe and Japan. The cause of this difference lies in the organization of postgraduate studies. In Italy, for example, doctorate programmes are tailored to suit the training needs of new university researchers and lecturers. Candidates are required to prepare a thesis, certainly not to create an enterprise. The provision of business doctorates alongside research doctorates would surely open the door for setting up companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Google in the IT and media businesses and Genentech and Amgen in cellular and molecular biology. However, such a goal is as ambitious as it is distant.
The laboratory–garden that hosts me is the first of its kind to be established in Ireland. Its programme includes business doctorates based on diagnostics and, most importantly, therapies for entrepreneurial initiatives that one would like to implement. In the laboratory we, doctorate students, are experimenting with highly innovative approaches for the creation of economic value. The therapies are clinically tested through interaction with private and public organisations and with potential clients. Thus the experiences of medical schools, where the impact of different learning models becomes integral to study and research, have been imported into the field of entrepreneurship.
The presence of talents from various countries in the laboratory facilitates the creation of international start-ups. It is likely that by 2020 some 80% of middle-class consumers will be living in countries that are not industrialised and so entrepreneurs have no choice but to explore the whole range of world markets. Companies set up by entrepreneurs from different geo-economic areas will be at an advantage because they will be able to rely on both the benefits of localisation and the opportunities offered by globalisation.
(Excerpt from Piero Formica, Stories of Innovation for the Millennial Generation. The Lynceus Long View, Palgrave Macmillan, August 2013)
(Provided to InnovationDAILY by Piero Formica)
