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Faculty Viewpoint with Carl Schramm: Helping Students Innovate
Helping Students Innovate
Carl J. Schramm
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CARL J. SCHRAMM, UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR I t was a crisp fall evening when I began class in the SU Art Gallery in Shaffer Hall. The museum staff was kind enough to allow my Introduction to Innovation class to meet after the galleries had closed. As I do every year, I held class there to engage one of eight mental exercises I’ve devised to disturb our normal pathways of thought, to “leave the dock” to which our brains are usually tethered — to think in different ways. This particular exercise focuses on two pieces of art, requiring the students to analyze the record of how someone else has seen the world.
The first is Hyachinthe Rigaud’s Portrait of Louis XIV (1701). Students are asked to trade places with Louis, looking at themselves through his eyes. What does the modern world look like? How can eighteen people be looking at him from a room with no windows that is filled with light? The second is Larry Rivers’ Poetry of K. Koch (1961). Students contemplate how impressionist art was an impossibility before Einstein and Freud changed our view of time and space and of human consciousness. We also reflect on how the genius of George Eastman made representational painting unnecessary.
Teaching this course, while very rewarding, continuously presents me with three unsettling observations. Unfortunately, they confirm macroeconomic research I have done, some of which is the foundation for my recent book, Burn the Business Plan. In the book I note that the number of Americans starting businesses every year, entrepreneurs, has been in free fall for twenty years. In 2016 entrepreneurs started 30% fewer businesses than in 1996. What’s not in my book is evidence that the rate of innovation across the economy is also falling. Robert Gordon, a respected economist, makes this point in his book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. The two statistics are related. They both suggest we are not as innovative as a society and, necessarily, as individuals, as we have been in the past. WHY? One theory relates to how poorly students are educated by our high schools. Many colleagues comment on their absence of curiosity. An immediate piece of evidence is that year after year, most (sometimes all) of my students, juniors and seniors, have never set foot in the University’s art gallery. How can this be? One reason is that many of my students, mostly coming from well-regarded high schools, never have had an art appreciation course. Most have never heard a live symphony. Fewer still have had a poetry course. This helps explain the second shortcoming that bears directly on limits to any individual’s ability to innovate, namely, the paucity of words at their command. It’s taken me some time to realize, but, students no longer enter college with the vocabulary that was once expected. Any doubt I had was put to rest when I discovered that in 2016 the SAT was made easier. The test, necessary for college entrance, no longer includes sentence completion questions that required students to chose appropriate final words. Worse, hundreds of tested vocabulary words were eliminated as “highly obscure or only relevant to one domain.” Thus, professors can no longer expect freshman to know the meaning of abrogate, deliberate, hypothesis, obsequious, transform or unscrupulous. Why is this relevant to my worry about “Generation Z” not being as innovative as previous cohorts? Simply, innovation is a synthetic process. With declining rigor in our high schools, where the acquisition of indispensable factual Louis XIV In Coronation Robes (painting by Hyacinthe Rigaud)*
and working knowledge of language, history, science and mathematics has been devalued as “rote learning,” displaced with “critical thinking,” students arrive in college without the tools to compose new ideas. Madame Curie’s observation comes to mind: “A great discovery does not issue from a scientist’s brain ready-made. It is the fruit of an accumulation of preliminary work.” Put more simply by my high school Latin teacher, “You can’t paint a barn with a dry brush.”
I believe there is a third culprit depressing innovation, one that is having the opposite of its intended effect. Universities, by emphasizing the unrealistic idea that entrepreneurship is a readily accessible career path to be pursued upon graduating, have implicitly taught students that creating new ideas, particularly ones that hold the promise of commercial success, is a competency particular to people in their twenties. This belief, quite naturally, reflects the stories of entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and others who experienced tremendous success starting companies just after college. Such individuals are, however, so rare that they and the companies they start are referred to as “unicorns.” To urge premature entrepreneurship results in unnecessary failure rates, the highest of all, in the cohort 20 to 30 year olds. And, countering the view that failure pays dividends in the future, only a fraction of entrepreneurs who fail in their twenties ever start another company.
Empirical studies tell us that innovation is not a young person’s game, no more than starting a successful new business is. “Big brain” innovators, those recognized with Nobel, Wolf, Abel and Breakthrough prizes as well as Lasker medals, make their salient discoveries, on average, in their forties. Similarly,
CARL J. SCHRAMM
empirical studies conducted by the Kauffman Foundation, have shown conclusively that average American entrepreneurs are 39 when starting their first companies.
The lesson? When we think about innovation, it is important that we realize that education can play a more effective role in preparing students to become more innovative and successful in starting businesses. A good place to start is for university presidents and college professors to join the chorus stumping for fundamental reform of American schooling. No student should get to college without having visited a museum, heard a symphony, or understand what deliberate means. How can STEM-focused high school training be working if students get to college not knowing the meaning of hypothesis or transform?
Second, we should prepare students to better understand that the life of an innovator or entrepreneur is not a sprint but a marathon. Reading history, including the biographies of scientists and business people, can’t help but provide a larger life lesson, namely, that time invested early in life in understanding as much as possible in as many fields as possible pays dividends in later life. Individuals so equipped are more likely to have the synthetic thoughts that we know as discovery in science and as the moment when a fledging entrepreneur sees how something can be done “faster, better and cheaper.” Finally, and closer to home, the iSchool can play a critical role as a model for undergraduate training that produces students who are better at thinking in innovative ways, equipped to outperform graduates of other universities at work, and likely to be more successful if and when they start their own companies. The iSchool curriculum strives to combine a solid intellectual frame on which the many relevant disciplines that make up the field of information sciences can work together to produce valuable new insights — the stuff of innovation. Second, our students are exposed to faculty who are engaged in the art of innovation — pushing frontiers of synthetic knowledge that relate to information theory and practice. Finally, the iSchool has made exposure to business through internship and other immersion experiences an integral part of the student experience.
Editor’s Note: Carl J. Schramm is a University Professor who teaches in the iSchool. His most recent book, Burn the Business Plan, was published in January, 2018 by Simon and Schuster. It was released in paperback in January, 2019. In October, 2018 Schramm was honored with the One America Award for Entrepreneurship for his expertise in entrepreneurship and philanthropy by the National Italian American Foundation.
*From Wikimedia Commons, CCO: 1.0 (universal public domain dedication - https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/ zero/1.0/deed.en)
