If you listened to President Obama's recent State of the Union Address, you will have noticed his (expected) emphasis on job-creation through small business and entrepreneurialism. With the US economy struggling to its feet, politicians and policymakers on both sides of the aisle have been making regular political hay of the macroeconomic benefits of entrepreneurialism. Typically this means touting small businesses and the removal of regulatory 'red tape' without describing in any detail how exactly we can promote and foster entrepreneurialism. For example, our elected officials and policy leaders seem to have plenty of vague ideas about how to provide tax breaks and incentives for the promotion of already-existing small businesses, but don't seem to have any substantive sense of where those small businesses come from in the first place. What educational and professional background (yes, they do at least acknowledge that education gives one a significant advantage in starting a successful business), or what set of skills, leads to successful entrepreneurship? Though our politicians and policy wonks do have stock answers to these questions--it's generally and uncritically accepted that business and technology education is essentially all we need to pay any attention to if we want to train the next generation of job-producers)--we are, as usual, living in a political climate in which it's easier to latch onto a few popularly held assumptions and repeat them for political gain than to think entrepreneurially about entrepreneurialism itself.
One economic sector that is truly a powerhouse of entrepreneurial spirit and practice is academia, though the talking points of politicians, journalists, and the like would have use believe otherwise. Conventional 'wisdom' would have it that entrepreneurialism is anathema to academics. As in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, in which the sensibilities of a curmudgeonly academic writer, Senior C, are contrasted with those of Alan, the young financial pragmatist, the academic man of belles lettres is portrayed as disconnected, unambitious, and sedentary, while the young businessman is always looking for ways to get paid (ethics aside). Such stereotypes even apply to academics who are viewed to be in more 'pragmatic' and widely encouraged fields, like the natural sciences: we don't look to the boffin the the white lab coat to start a company (like, I don't know, Genentech).
The truth, however, is that few professions, if any, are as fundamentally entrepreneurial as academia. Even in the study of subjects like, say, literature, which are less 'applied' in terms of their research output, one's livelihood depends directly and almost exclusively on one's ability to generate new, viable, and reasoned ideas, to articulate these ideas to several levels of audiences, to identify and/or create a market for these ideas, and to capitalize on them (literally, to translate ideas written on paper into real monetary gain). There are no teams, and rarely any collaborations for the majority of research output, which means that you live and die by your ability take an idea from its infancy to its marketability to your payday. If this sounds like a crude way of expressing the academic research process, consider yourself disabused of the dated stereotypes and silly fantasies you've been fed about life in the 'Ivory Tower.' If there's anyone who understands what it means to be an entrepreneur every day and in every step of his or her career, it's an academic; particularly an academic in a field for which there is little governmental or other institutional support and a hypercompetitive marketplace for ideas. No, this experience is not in itself identical to the experience of starting a company and managing a crop of employees from the ground up; but it is an outstanding exercise in realizing ideas from conception to viability to marketability to payoff, an exercise not unlike some of the earliest and most crucial phases of business entrepreneurship (likely for this reason, academics actually tend to be more likely than the average American to start a business of their own).
Beyond these aspects of entrepreneurialism, of course, it remains the case that in 'knowledge economies' academics are also tremendously important as educators. But, when policymakers are looking for new ideas and new sources of economic growth, they would do better to acknowledge the unacknowledged entrepreneurial resource that most of us presume falsely to be useless and idealistic by choice: the academics.
