Page 180 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

53231_Innovation and Entrepreneurship.qxd 11/8/2002 10:50 AM Page 173

The Entrepreneurial Business 173

could most easily spare. In Boyer’s Empire State College, the adults
attend regular university courses in one of the colleges or universities
of the state university. But first the adult students are assigned a “men-
tor,” usually a member of a nearby state university faculty. The mentor
helps them work out their programs and decide whether they need spe-
cial preparation, and where, conversely, their experience qualifies them
for advanced standing and work. And then the mentor acts as broker,
negotiating admission, standing, and program for each applicant with
the appropriate institution.
All this may sound like common sense—and so it is. Yet it was
quite a break with the habits and mores of American academia and
was fought hard by the state university establishment. But Boyer per-
sisted. His Empire State College program has now become the first
successful program of this kind in American higher education, with
more than six thousand students, a negligible dropout rate, and a mas-
ter’s program. Boyer, the arch-innovator, did not cease to be an
“administrator.” From chancellor of the State University of New York
he went on to become, first, President Carter’s Commissioner of
Education, and then president of the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching—respectively, the most “bureaucratic”
and the most “establishment” job in American academia.
These examples do not prove that anyone can excel at being both
a bureaucrat and an innovator. Schure and Boyer are surely excep-
tional people. But their experiences do show that there is no specific
“personality” for either task. What is needed is willingness to learn,
willingness to work hard and persistently, willingness to exercise
self-discipline, willingness to adapt and to apply the right policies
and practices. Which is exactly what any enterprise that adopted
entrepreneurial management has found out with respect to people and
staffing.

To enable the entrepreneurial project to be run successfully, as
something new, the structure and organization have to be right; rela-
tionships have to be appropriate; and compensation and rewards have
to fit. But when all this has been done, the question of who is to run
the unit, and what should be done with them when they have suc-
ceeded in building up the new project, must be decided on an indi-
vidual basis for this person or that person, rather than according to
this or that psychological theory for none of which there is much
empirical evidence.