We watched the movie The Pursuit of Happyness last night. It's a pretty incredible story and one that really leaves you feeling humbled. You lose perspective on how easy (relatively speaking) it is to be successful if you have the resources to support that pursuit. It takes resources to go to college or continue your education. If you're in the poorer end of the population, how do you invest in yourself? You need both the time and the money, either directly or via access to credit, to break out of that lower-class, paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. That's the economic perspective on the movie. The one that really touches you is what drives people to improve themselves. In this case, it was all about how Chris Gardener was trying to succeed simply to provide a home for his son. I suppose there is no better motivation. Great movie. I highly recommend it.
I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...
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