Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught redux

My colleague at The ThinkTank, Erin Schmidt, asked a great question today....

Can entrepreneurship be taught?

Disclosure - our nonprofit division works with the South Florida chapter of a national organization that helps young people from low-income and disadvantaged communities learn entrepreneurship and business skills in middle and high school. NFTE , which is short for The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, gives these young people the tools to break the cycle of poverty and find their own pathway to prosperity through financial independence and a sense of purpose.

These amazing young kids develop business plans and learn about the value of making it on their own, creating a concept, an idea, a vision and applying those in real-world, real-time applications.

The result is a generation of youth who recognize that jobs are not for life and college is no guarantee of employment. These are the youth that are creating small economic engines in communities all over the country, determined to be the first in their family to finish high school, go to college and start own business - or two.

These youth are our entrepreneurs of tomorrow and living proof that entrepreneurship can indeed be taught. As Erin wrote in her blog, "entrepreneurship should be taught not just within the walls of the university – but in our public school systems and in our communities, so that we can nurture and mentor the next generation of innovators."

You can also read a related post in the New York Times' You're The Boss Blog

On Journalism: The Futility of "Exclusive" Scoops

The futility of "exclusive" scoops in today's media cycle is, well, futile...

Last week, the Daily Online Examiner's article Major Newspapers Claim Right To Keep Scoops Exclusive described the futile and somewhat disingenuous recent filing of a legal brief by a handful of major US newspapers in an effort to prevent rival publications from picking up and putting out their “scoops”.

The argument is based on a case before federal appellate court wherein an online publication published a bank’s stock recommendations before some of the bank’s clients were notified. The larger implication, though, is that mainstream publications like the New York Times or the Washington Post (two newspapers that have joined the brief) would have the ability to prevent their exclusive stories from being reprinted (or, more likely, reposted online) by their competitors.

Good luck with that.

My view is that such an action has no basis and no precedent, and effectively undermines the public good achieved by the rapid dissemination of information, no matter who breaks it.

Journalism has always been in a bit of a bind in this area. It is called the Fourth Estate for its immense public value as a government watchdog, yet to facilitate that function journalism must be as removed from government control and influence as possible. This means journalism must be a for-profit, capitalist enterprise, which in turn means there must be stiff competition.

Once again, this means journalism must be a for-profit, capitalist enterprise, which in turn means there must be stiff competition. Got that?

Exclusives, scoops, and being the first to break a story are ways of achieving competitive advantage in this market, and so of course it's understandable that those organizations devoting the most resources to the gathering of news want to protect this advantage. Finder keepers, losers weepers.

But doing so in this way nearly nullifies journalism’s Fourth Estate status. AJ Liebling once wrote that “the function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.”

The latter part of this dichotomy may be more and more difficult in the internet age, but the former has never been as important.