October 17, 2007

Fourth Intangible: The need of region-specific ideas to be created

It has been extensively proved that people values and culture determine their way of thinking and approaching problems. For that reason, multicultural teams are more likely to obtain creative and innovative results that homogeneous ones.
That seems to work in the same way as biological evolution: endogamic behaviors tend to degenerate a species. On the contrary, exogamic behaviors tend to improve next generations.
For the past ten years, multinational companies have been changing their structure from a national based structure (that is, different product lines are assigned to different countries) to a multicultural based one (promoting movements of people between different countries in an attempt to create multicultural teams around a product or subject).
This reveals that each region has a different approach to life based on particular idiosyncratic values, so, we could take advantage of idiosyncratic values in order to develop region-specific ideas.
If entrepreneurship is based in region-specific knowledge, sustainable success is more likely to happen, as new developments will be based in the differential characteristics of that region.
So, it is important to create and support mechanisms that develop region-specific knowledge.
Again, University is in a good position for supporting these mechanisms: University Institutions deal with young people and one of their main functions is to transfer values and knowledge to the society in which they are placed.
To publish professors and students opinions in local mass media is a good way to transfer the entrepreneurship values to society. If entrepreneurship values are referred to region-specific products or characteristics, they will be much more effective to thepurpose of establishing a sustainable entrepreneurship behavior in society







October 02, 2007

Third intangible: the need of informal entrepreneurship forums

Venkataraman states in his article that innovative ideas need informal forums to come up. So, the learning process should provide a way to develope such informal forums. New education methodologies based and supported on information technologies can easily establish the seed for promoting face to face informal discussions in the usual meeting points.
Blogs and wikipedias are key tools to achieve our goal.

We can promote the exchange of ideas around an specific topic through electronic tools. Well-known professionals can interact in these blogs and tell their own point of view based on their experience.

If students get used to express their opinions based on their knowledge within the University environment, then informal debates will be easier to come up when they meet in informal meeting points.

Nowadays, Spanish High Education is mostly based in masterly classes, and students are not very proned to the exchange of ideas. This tendency should be changed if we want to promote innovative thinking.

Since the amount of classroom sesions disminishes in the new Bolognia structure, an environment to promote discussion out of the classroom is needed.

So, it is essential to stablish electronic forums in which everybody can show their opinion and questions about a specific topic.

Starting with the opinions generated within the blog , in-depth discussions can be developed during the classroom sesions . In this way, students will be able to obtain the most of it.