The INOV8 blog tracks the latest news and trends in technology and innovation throughout the world
Perhaps these will surprise you.
Here are a few to tease….
10. Entrepreneurs are usually better educated than their parents.
11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.
12. The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own companies.
Whoops, I submitted before finishing.
My point is: there’s a balance. Clearly, capitalism has performed wonders–there’s no dispute about that. It is, as Winston Churchill said, “the worst economic system, except for all the others.”
Capitalism is great for aligning self interests with community interests: it rewards the individual for innovation for the use of the community. But it’s foolhardy to think a rigidly laissez faire approach works in every scenario: think environmental regulations or worker’s rights. The problem of “collective action” is studied extensively in business/economics courses.
If you look at the application requirements to the premiere business schools–Stanford, Harvard, etc–there is a noticeable pragmatism about the limits of government and business. Interestingly, one movement that is blossoming at these schools is social entrepreneurship, which sort of is a mix of market mechanisms and community goodwill to alleviate the conditions of those with the least in the world and society. This is because the market is not structured in a manner that directly helps the least among us because it incentivizes the creation of services and innovation for those who can afford it. (I’m taking that thought directly from Bill Gates in Creative Capitalism.) In other words, I have no incentive to produce an innovation that will be used by those who can’t afford to buy it in the first place.
For some reason, I am doubtful that any of the businessmen I listed are socialists or communists.
Oh goodness gracious.
Bill Gates- Democrat
Warren Buffett- Democrat
Google Founders – Democrats
Steve Jobs – Democrat
Me – lean Democrat
The top university I go to, and its top business school: majority progressive/libertarian
And, they have the courage to drop pebbles in the placid pond, think out of the bubble and live out of the box like a nail sticking up on the front porch never fearing the hammer, and for all that to happen, there must be individual freedom guaranteed by the governing system, as described in THE CHANGING FACE OF DEMOCRATS on Amazon.com and in http://www.claysamerica.com.