This is the continuation of a blog I started a few years ago on Blogger, then migrated last year to my own site. I’ve been pretty haphazard about posting, and it hasn’t gained much traction. Hopefully, I’ll be more consistent moving forward so I can find an audience. I use Twitter to make brief comments about things that interest me (follow me – @profkenc), and I use the blog when I need more space to make a point.
Originally, I was focused on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial education, but as I transition to my new role as Dean of the School of Business, Public Administration, and Information Sciences at Long Island University in Brooklyn, I will expand my comments to include all aspects of business and higher education.
I believe that my position and background give me a unique perspective on business and higher education that may be of interest to some. For one thing, roughly half of my career has been in business and half in academia. That means I understand and can speak to both of those constituencies. It is a unending source of amazement to me that businesspeople and the academics who dedicate their lives to studying them have so little to say to each other. This is especially true among entrepreneurs, who often believe that no one who hasn’t been through what they have can possibly understand them; and business scholars, who sometimes resort to arcane econometric models that serve no practical purpose in order to publish in top journals and advance their careers. I understand both of these perspectives, but don’t fully agree with either. One of the things I hope to do with this blog is to argue for a type of business research and business education that is both useful to practice and provides practical knowledge to our students in order to prepare them to take their place as leaders in society upon graduation.
Secondly, I would like to focus on what entrepreneurship is, which is a specific way of thinking and viewing the world (I will post exactly what I mean by this in the near future). Our views of entrepreneurship tend to be economic – jobs and wealth created, industries destroyed or transformed, etc. There is nothing wrong with this, but it does get away from the actual act of being entrepreneurial, which is just as creative an act as any artistic endeavor, and often does not involve a profit motive at all.
Thirdly, I strongly believe we are in a disruptive period for higher education, and those of us in academia will be faced with increasing competition from a variety of sources. We must respond by ensuring that we are relevant to the students we serve, and that we are adding value to all of our many and varied stakeholders. I know I am not alone in this view. I don’t pretend to have all of the answers, but I do believe that we need new thinking and entrepreneurial action in order to survive and thrive. The old ways of operating will not be sufficient in the future.
Finally, I’ve been looking around for a while and I just haven’t found other blogs that address these issues. Maybe I’m not looking in the right place. If you know of any, let me know and I’ll gladly link to them.
As I get rolling with this thing, please feel free to comment on anything I post, good or bad. Assuming I don’t get ridiculous amounts of spam or hate mail, I’ll post all comments without moderating.
