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172 THE PRACTICE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

$180 million department at General Electric, with its billions of sales
as I used to do, or a new, growing diagnostic-instrument innovator with
$6 million in sales, as I do now. Of course I do different things and do
things differently. But I apply the concepts I learned at G.E. and do
exactly the same analysis. The transition was easier, in fact, than when
I moved, ten years earlier, from being a bench engineer into my first
management job.”
Public-service institutions teach the same lesson. Among the most
successful innovators in recent American history are two men in high-
er education, Alexander Schure and Ernest Boyer. Schure started out
as a successful inventor in the electronics field, with a good many
patents to his name. But in 1955, when he was in his early thirties, he
founded the New York Institute of Technology as a private university
without support from government, foundation, or big company, and
with brand-new ideas regarding the kind of students to be recruited
and what they were to be taught as well as how. Thirty years later, his
institute has become a leading technical university with four campus-
es, one of them a medical school, and almost twelve thousand stu-
dents. Schure still works as a successful electronics inventor. But he
has also been for these thirty years the full-time chancellor of his uni-
versity, and has, by all accounts, built up a professional and effective
management team.
In contrast to Schure, Boyer started out as an administrator, first
in the University of California system, then in the State University of
New York, which with 350,000 student and 64 campuses is the
biggest and most bureaucratic of American university systems. By
1970, Boyer, at forty-two, had worked his way to the top and was
appointed chancellor. He immediately founded the Empire State
College—actually not a college at all but an unconventional solution
to one of the oldest and most frustrating failures of American higher
education, the degree program for adults who do not have full aca-
demic credentials.
Although tried many times, this had never worked before. If these
adults were admitted to college programs together with the “regular”
younger students, no attention was usually paid to their aims, their
needs, and least of all to their experience. They were treated as if they
were eighteen years old, got discouraged, and soon dropped out. But if,
as was tried repeatedly, they were put into special “continuing educa-
tion programs,” they were likely to be considered a nuisance and
shoved aside, with programs staffed by whatever faculty the university