Education for Innovation: Entrepreneurial Breakthroughs versus Corporate Incremental Improvements

This paper explores several hypotheses about the appropriate education for entrepreneurship that encourages innovation: (1) breakthrough inventions are contributed disproportionately by independent inventors and entrepreneurs, while large firms focus on cumulative, incremental (and often invaluable) improvements; (2) education for mastery of scientific knowledge and methods is enormously valuable for innovation and growth but can impede heterodox thinking and imagination; (3) large-firm research and development (R&D) requires personnel who are highly educated in extant information and analytic methods, while successful independent entrepreneurs and inventors often lack such preparation; and (4) while procedures for teaching current knowledge and methods in science and engineering are effective, we know little about training for the critical task of breakthrough innovation.