Articles

Thomas Edison and Walt Disney are not just America’s greatest creative problem-solvers. They are paragons of all the antifragile entrepreneurial skills we have discussed. Edison is famous for the thousands of “failures” it took to come up with the right filament for his lightbulb. Disney’s businesses failed several times, and he almost went bankrupt in the midst of creating two of his many masterpieces – the film “Snow White” and Disneyland. Indeed, it was only after he lost his first…

My journey as an online learner in the MITx Entrepreneurship 101 course on edX marked for me the beginning of a progressive discovery of the power and importance of community.  There is a deep joy that can be experienced through building inspired and respectful collaborations, based on reciprocity and the feeling of something being moved forward together. Although working with one another is sometimes terribly challenging and certainly always complex, it might ultimately be the only effective…

One of the most recent lessons in letting go and surrendering to what wants to happen in the community was the #24hours24steps prototype: an uninterrupted, 24-hour-long video meeting, designed to be open to all members of the MBA² community.

The idea that the head of the country’s patent office predicted the end of invention is laughably ironic until replaced by the irony that it was the opposite of how Commissioner Duell actually felt. How then more absurd is the actual prognostication 56 years earlier, also by the head of the country’s patent office. Want some more irony? Samuel F.B. Morse would invent no less than the telegraph in 1844, a year later. Fortunately for civilization, entrepreneurs are more the Duell types. There is…

“How do you make God laugh? Make plans!” This tiny maxim is at the core of how applying improv techniques to your life and your business will help make you an antifragile human. Of course, plans are crucial to the entrepreneur. But what happens when the plans go south? What do you do when life happens?

One of the great challenges for me as an entrepreneurship educator is knowing whether the material I am teaching works. How do I know it works for others? How do I answer the logical and appropriate challenge of “prove it?”

The dynamics that shape judgment and behaviour have always been in the spotlight of managerial curiosity, since our choices take place within a vast horizon of options, and especially for deliverables with high intrinsic and extrinsic value, like education.

When I first started as the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship a decade ago, I thought my job was to help students create more and better startups. Fortunately, some wiser and more experienced faculty members reminded me that we were part of an educational institution. It made me think of the old adage that states, “It’s better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish.” We wanted to teach our students not just how to launch single businesses—we wanted to…

One of the most recent lessons in letting go and surrendering to what wants to happen in the community was the #24hours24steps prototype: an uninterrupted, 24-hour-long video meeting, designed to be open to all members of the MBA² community.

Recently, a colleague from Stanford sent me a link to an article that he had run across in the Silicon Republic. Now I must admit, that is not a publication I usually read but I was happy when I saw MIT EDP alum Mary Rodgers smiling picture at the top of the article. Mary is an entrepreneurship amplifier in Galway’s (Ireland) Portershed. The title of the article was “Founders need to articulate and sell the value of change to customers” which was nice but I really wanted to hear what else Mary…