Entrepreneurs shifting to small towns
The
Small Business Trend's blog discusses the trend identified by BusinessWeek.com (July, 2005)
of entrepreneurs bypassing big cities in favor of small towns. This is further evidence of the change wrought by the digital knowledge economy but one finally in favor of small towns and rural areas:
"With the old-line manufacturing economy almost a thing of the past and service and information economies taking its place, the enticements that make a city attractive for entrepreneurs also are changing. The traditional menu of tax incentives, low office rents, and favorable regulatory environments remain in play. But more frequently, observers say, a host of variables that emphasize quality of life, population diversity, infrastructure, and a culture of creativity have become weightier matters to consider when choosing a city."
Conceptual Thinking Needed
Lee L. Chazen (Spaces in Between) points to
Daniel Pink, in A Whole New Mind, and
Tom Friedman's The World is Flat, which argue for growing needs in conceptual and creative thinking to compete with significant new economic centers in 2nd and 3rd world countries.
Open innovation and absorptive capacity
Schools build classroom communities. Most of a teacher's time is spent with a group, not one on one with a student. Entrepreneurship curriculum (and all curriculum areas) need to carefully study the social and management environment that builds the creative individual so needed for 21st century economic growth. The
Managing for Creativity article (July-August, 2005) from the Harvard Business Review highlights two key concepts that need weaving into the curriculum and our use of computer technology.
"While most students of the creative process have focused on what makes individuals creative, a growing number of thinkers such as
Andrew Hargadon at the University of California, Davis, and
John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox, are unlocking the social and management contexts in which creativity is most effectively nurtured, harnessed, and mobilized. Eric von Hippel of MIT and Henry Chesbrough of the University of California, Berkeley, have called attention to the critical role played by users and customers in the creative process and to a new model of “
open innovation.” Duke University’s Wesley Cohen has shown that corporate creativity depends upon a firm’s “
absorptive capacity”—the ability of its research and development units not just to create innovations but to absorb them from outside sources."
The SAS Institute puts these concepts in practice by also valuing the work over the tools, rewarding excellence with challenges, and minimizing hassles.
In turn, the tools with which we teach, including distance education tools, need to foster open innovation and absorptive capacity. Creating a cascade of voices that bridges traditional composition with new tools that do precisely that would include blog sites, wikis and other newly emerging tools of the Internet.
