Anthropologists and Entrepreneurs
Teaching Entrepreneurship in a University setting is a mixed bag because on the one hand there exists the ‘Ivory Tower’ of theoretical study and high esteem of knowledge and creativity without the real world ‘rubber meets the road’ results focused implementation that is the trademark of successful entrepreneurship. On the other hand, there are some very forward thinking practices that unfold that the ‘real world’ should take note of. One such practice is the combination of three disciplines to bring a concept to market. Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Anthropology.
Engineering and Entrepreneurship have partnered together for at least the past 20+ years in the entrepreneurial thoroughbred Universities like Stanford and MIT and have spawned countless successful ventures from the likes of Yahoo! and Google and so on. But never has Anthropology been invited to the game… until now. Fresno State has launched a cooperative between the three disciplines to bring products to market and I think it is absolutely brilliant!
At first I was skeptical because I didn’t have a clue as to what a bone digging anthropologist could bring to the table, but boy was I mistaken. Anthropology is the study of cultures and what brings meaning to their lives. By bringing anthropologists to the team, a new ventures chance of success goes up significantly. This is due to their ability to dig into a culture (aka prospective market) and find out what they need and how they think about what they need so that the engineers can tailor the product exactly to those needs and the entrepreneur can create sales messages based on how that culture thinks in their own language.
The anthropologists perspective brings the sound minded market research to the table the myopic engineers and over zealous entrepreneurs desperately need. There are countless cases in academia and the real world where products were created, skewed research was done that aligned with everyone’s hopes and dreams and the venture was launched with massive failure because the market really wasn’t willing to give over their cold hard cash for it after all.
Needless to say I’m excited to be part of this cooperative and help bring the entrepreneurial perspective (strategic planning, scalability and sales) to the table to help launch products that are truly worthwhile.
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