Page 117 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

53231_Innovation and Entrepreneurship.qxd 11/8/2002 10:50 AM Page 110

110 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

development, right after the Napoleonic wars. Until then bankers
were moneylenders who lent against “security” (e.g., the taxing
power of a prince). Saint-Simon’s banker was to “invest,” that is, to
create new wealth-producing capacity. Saint-Simon had extraordi-
nary influence in his time, and a popular cult developed around his
memory and his ideas after his death in 1826. Yet it was not until 1852
that two disciples, the brothers Jacob and Isaac Pereire, established
the first entrepreneurial bank, the Credit Mobilier, and with it ushered
in what we now call finance capitalism.
Similarly, many of the elements needed for what we now call
management were available right after World War I. Indeed, in 1923,
Herbert Hoover, soon to be President of the United States, and
Thomas Masaryk, founder and president of Czechoslovakia, con-
vened the first International Management Congress in Prague. At the
same time a few large companies here and there, especially DuPont
and General Motors in the United States, began to reorganize them-
selves around the new management concepts. In the next decade a
few “true believers,” especially an Englishman, Lyndall Urwick, the
founder of the first management consulting firm which still bears his
name, began to write on management. Yet it was not until my Concept
of the Corporation (1946) and Practice of Management (1954) were
published that management become a discipline accessible to man-
agers all over the world. Until then each student or practitioner of
“management” focused on a separate area; Urwick on organization,
others on the management of people, and so on. My books codified
it, organized it, systematized it. Within a few years, management
became a worldwide force.
Today, we experience a similar lead time in respect to learning
theory. The scientific study of learning began around 1890 with
Wilhelm Wundt in Germany and William James in the United States.
After World War II, two Americans—B. F. Skinner and Jerome
Bruner, both at Harvard—developed and tested basic theories of
learning, Skinner specializing in behavior and Bruner in cognition.
Yet only now is learning theory beginning to become a factor in our
schools. Perhaps the time has come for an entrepreneur to start
schools based on what we know about learning, rather than on the old
wives’ tales about it that have been handed down through the ages.
In other words, the lead time for knowledge to become applicable
technology and begin to be accepted on the market is between twen-
ty-five and thirty-five years.