Gosh, if I got excited about the last post (about a new model of engineering school) actually having possibility, I could get rhapsodic about the idea of teaching company managers about Intrapreneurs and the seven rules for managing them. Why, one might even imagine that we could teach managers how to encourage innovation and innovators within companies rather than how to kill it.
Phil McKinney's powerful anecdote when he was HP's Chief Innovation Officer still rings in my ears: "Take any group of kindergarten kids, and they're all creative. It takes the public schools three or four years to beat it out of them. Only a few survive that process. They become scientists and engineers, and then industry hires them. It takes us three or four more years to beat it out of those kids."
Sad, and too true.
It'd be fun to imagine having a core curriculum devoted to stimulating innovation support by top managers, but it'd be hard to imagine many top managers finding their way to such a program. They'll be too busy with quarterly results, unhappy shareholders, and wet-between-the-ears analysts from HBS
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