Forbes has ranked the most entrepreneurial campuses in the U.S. The methodology emphasizes "whether the school offers a major or concentration in entrepreneurial studies; whether the school operates programs like a small business incubator or venture capital fund to help students launch their own businesses; and whether the school offers opportunities for students to learn about entrepreneurship through internships or cooperative study."

And the winner is ... The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

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Almost immediately after returning from Scout Camp, I took off for the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in New Orleans. New Orleans in August? Well, with over 7,000 attendees, they needed a convention city, and it's hard to top New Orleans for hotel space. Regulars at this meeting call it "The Academy." This sounds a bit presumptuous to us outsiders, but as long as we understand each other, I suppose it's all right.

One thing became clear to me immediately: people do not attend the Academy to learn from the sessions; they attend the Academy to network. (This is not unlike the annual meeting of law professors at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting, which is held each January. Coincidentally, New Orleans will host the meeting next year.)

Most sessions had barely more people in the audience than presenting. And after attending a few sessions, I could understand why: the presentations were clipped, ill-designed if the purpose was to engage in meaningful scholarly exchange. Most presentations were limited to three or four PowerPoint slides. Enough to spark an interest, but not enough for real learning.

Alongside the meeting, Ph.D candidates were interviewing for jobs. The candidates were usually easy to spot: they were wearing suits and that anxious smile like a high school kid at his first dance. Many of the candidates has 10, 15, 20, or more interviews, so it looked like an extended torture. I am happy to be on this side of the desk.

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My colleague Anuj Desai drew my attention to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It describes some of the initiatives of universities that recently received grants from the Kauffman Foundation to take entrepreneurship out of the business school. (We were in the running for one of the grants, though we were ultimately not selected.) The most interesting part of the article to me was the description of dissenters to the program.

For example, Stewart A. Weaver, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, had this to say:

However broadly one attempts to define it, the term 'entrepreneurship' has unavoidably commercial implications that are unsuited to an undergraduate college of arts and sciences. The focus on entrepreneurship detracts from teaching about lasting values like wisdom and humanity that don't have any commercial value.

While the principal goal of the Kauffman program is to expand the notion of entrepreneurship beyond the commercial realm, I am a skeptic of so-called social entrepreneurship programs. The source of my skepticism is simply that I am not sure that "social entrepreneurship" has any distinctive content. Frankly, nothing I have heard from people who talk about social entrepreneurship has convinced me that "social entrepreneurship" is anything other than "entrepreneurship."

And this seems to be at the heart of Professor Weaver's objections. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about successful competition, how to get ahead. The tension between capitalism and community has been discussed on this blog before, and I cannot claim that Professor Weaver is completely off track. On the other hand, I do claim that he misses an important purpose of entrepreneurships studies:

To make his point, Mr. Weaver and his wife, Celia S. Applegate, an associate professor of history, approached the university's curriculum committee with a spoof proposal for a course: "Great Entrepreneurs of the 20th Century: Gandhi and Hitler." Rather than take a traditional historical look at the two men, the two professors said, "we will take a commercial approach that recognizes the shared entrepreneurial talents that each might well have admired in the other." In Hitler's case, that talent might be "how an ambitious but not-very-talented painter took the idea of racial supremacy and turned it into a workable method of plunder, murder, and genocide." The point, Mr. Weaver says, was to show the "moral slippage that can ensue when you start applying market metaphors indiscriminately to history."

Obviously, the purpose of studying entrepreneurship is not to "apply market metaphors indiscriminately to history," but to better understand the role of entrepreneurs in society. My problem with Professor Weaver and others who share his position, is not that they are wrong about the commercial nature of entrepreneurship, but that they somehow have come to believe that the study of commerce is inherently inferior to the study of other facets of human behavior and interaction. Courses in entrepreneurship are not necessarily courses in "how to start and run a successful business." (Strange that Weaver doesn't see this, given his interest in industrial history.)

Weaver's objections appear to be a form of intellectual parochialism aimed at preserving his particular view of "higher education." The root problem with his educational program is that -- contrary to his elevated claims about wisdom and humanity -- it produces students who are incapable of understanding the world in which they live. In Professor Weaver's ideal university, vast tracts of human interaction are off limits, and that is shameful.

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The United States is much derided around the world today, but in the area of entrepreneurship we are still the model. The European Union's recent report on "Helping to create an entrepreneurial culture" testifies of that fact:

The image of entrepreneurs as positive role models has never been as strong in Europe as in the US. Becoming an entrepreneur has long been seen as an unsafe and risky option, not particularly appealing and less socially rewarding than other, more traditional professions. The educational systems have not in the past been geared towards the development of entrepreneurship and self-employment, the final goal of the educational path being rather to produce employees working in a big company or in public administration.

This is a fascinating document, which raises important questions about the creation of entrepreneurial culture.

I am headed for Europe next week, and among the stops is the Babson-Kauffman Entrepreneurship Research Conference, being held this year in Glasgow. Among other things, I expect to see a lot of European academics who study entrepreneurship in countries that are not very entrepreneurial. A few years ago, a friend from Finland commented that Finns study entrepreneurship to death, but ultimately do nothing. To me the problem seems more complex: what exactly is to be done?

The premise of the EU report is that most entrepreneurs are made, not born, and the purpose of the report is to encourage efforts toward developing education in entrepreneurship. This includes "promoting the development of personal qualities that are relevant to entrepreneurship, such as creativity, spirit of initiative, risk-taking and responsibility; raising students’ awareness of self-employment as a career option ...; and providing the business skills that are needed in order to start a new venture." Will this work in any meaningful sense? Well, it isn't clear to me that public primary and secondary school teachers are effective entrepreneurship instructors, but I like the aspiration. One of the reasons I feel a sense of mission about entrepreneurship is that entrepreneurs in the mold contemplated by this report are independent and self-directed, not mere cogs in a great machine. Ultimately, entrepreneurship is about leading a better life, not just making money.

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Synergy Fest pointed me to a press release on the Stanford Business School's website entitled "Failure is the Key to Understanding Success." This summarizes work by Jerker Denrell, who purports to have discovered a deep secret of organizations research: don't forget to study failure if you want to understand success.

This is an area of striking contrast between law professors and business professors. While business professors fret about sampling biases in favor of successful events, law professors almost uniformly study failures. The bread and butter of our teaching and research remains the judicial opinion, and most judicial opinions (at least in my areas of law) are the end result of badly fractured relationships. It's no wonder lawyers tend to be a cynical lot.

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Now removed by several years from the internet bubble, we should begin to have some profound thoughts about that experience. Fast Company asked several luminaries for their views:

* Sue Bostrom (Cisco Sr. VP): "Internet productivity is real."
* Robert Shiller (Yale): "It's just hard to understand what's coming up."
* Jeffrey Dachis (former Razorfish CEO): "The 1990s were about greed, lying, and stupidity."
* Bob Paul (Covisint CEO): "Unless you have laserlike focus on the problem you're trying to solve, technology is irrelevant."
* Ann Winblad (founder Hummer Winblad Venture Partners): "optimism cannot outweigh execution."

These snippets are not entirely fair, as each of the respondents had more to say, but I find it intriguing that we could still be so ambivalent about the lessons from the 1990s. We recognize that the world is not the same as it was before -- that it is, indeed, dramatically different because of the internet. Nevertheless, we also recognize that change is not inherently good and that many people can be harmed by the process. In short the triumphalism of the 1990s is largely gone. Robert Shiller expresses the angst that many of us feel:

I'm sure there will be more Bill Gateses -- really rich people who are not rich today. But I don't know if that is going to affect the whole economy favorably. I worry about millions of people being left behind and falling in their standard of living. I think that widening gap may be the most important issue of this time.

Me, too.

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Is there a separate field of entrepreneurship studies? That was part of our conversation on Friday in the INSITE Research Frontiers. This issue is important in business schools, which have devoted substantial resources to entrepreneurship studies over the past few decades. The question is whether there is any there there. That is, can we find any reason to treat the study of entrepreneurship separately from other fields of study.

Strategy scholars successfully made the case for their discipline in the 1970s. Organizational behavior scholars made the case for their field before that. In the end, the answer depends on whether there is anything distinctive about entrepreneurship. We know, for example, that organizations behave differently than individuals; therefore, it makes sense to separate the study of organizational behavior from the study of individual behavior. But are entrepreneurs different from other people like organizations are different from individuals? Even if you intuitively believe that entrepreneurs are different, proving it is another matter. So far, studies of entrepreneurs' interests, behaviors, and personalities are all over the map. Those who want recognition for this field still need to make the case.

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Barry, you emphasize the irrationality of starting a business. In a prior post, Jeff Cornwall and I have a short exchange about entrepreneurial irrationality. He claims that entrepreneurs are "rarely gamblers," to which I respond, "successful entrepreneurs rarely view themselves as gamblers." My point was that entrepreneurs are so confident in themselves and/or their idea that they do not think of their venture as a gamble, regardless of what their friends and family say. In his rejoinder, Jeff observes: "I am amazed at the number of entrepreneurs who really are prudent in decision making." He suggests that entrepreneurs might be both confident and careful. Three questions about this:

(1) Do you favor one side over the other in this debate -- remember, you are at my blog now! -- or do you have a different view?

(2) If you are crazy, do you know it? You have written a book packed with sensible advice, but I get the feeling that much of what you say is tainted by hindsight bias. In other words, you can see the lessons now, but you learned the lessons by doing, both making mistakes and creating successes. If that is true, will budding entrepreneurs really be able to internalize your advice, or will they understand it only after going crazy for awhile?

(3) That last question is a nice segue to this idea: I am interested in hearing about the prospect of "creating" the entrepreneurial mind through education. This is a variation on that old question, are entrepreneurs born, not made? In your view, what is the role of entrepreneurship education in spurring entrepreneurship? (Note that Barry believes that entrepreneurs are "genetically optimistic," but "even with the proper genetic makeup, you won't be an entrepreneur unless you take the leap and seek your edge.")

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My absence yesterday and light posting generally recently can be attributed to a last-second push to prepare a grant application for the Kauffman Foundation. We are competing in this program for some dollars to take entrepreneurship education campus-wide.

I spent last night and this morning in Kansas City as part of the Wisconsin team that was pitching our plan to the Kauffman judges. I have no idea whether we will get the money, but we learned a lot about ourselves and about entrepreneurship during the past few months. Moreover, we now have a plan for building on the success of INSITE. I just wanted to say that I am impressed with the zeal of the Kauffman Foundation in promoting entrepreneurship. For those of you who are on the outside looking in, entrepreneurship people may seem like a strange subculture, but animating their actions is a deep conviction that entrepreneurship can change the world for the better. I enjoy being part of something like that.

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Over the past few months, I have been thinking fairly intensely about entrepreneurship education. As you undoubtedly know, entrepreneurship studies are of relatively recent vintage, and they tend to be confined to business schools and economics and engineering departments. It's a shame.

Law should be a much bigger part of the mix because it plays a central role in shaping most entrepreneurial activity. I suspect a great deal of the blame for this omission should be placed on lawyers. To date we have not used "entrepreneurship" as one of the myriad categories to organize our study of law. As a result, when entrepreneurship scholars think about law in connection with entrepreneurship, they usually think about patents or trademarks, but this is too narrow a coneption of the role of law.

We lawyers have a lot to offer to entrepreneurship scholars, most of whom (in my experience) are woefully ignorant of the legal structures -- not just partnerships, corporations, LLCs, etc., but also the contractual relationships -- that shape much entrepreneurial activity. I plan to do something about this, but I cannot disclose it here. Not yet. I hope to have something more substantial to say on this subject by the end of next summer.

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