By CHRIS ANDAYA
On November 15, 2024, Beloit College hosted 2024 Miller Upton Scholar, David Audretsch for the Upton Forum. Marking the 16th year of Upton Forums, the lecture occurred in Eaton Chapel, packed with students, faculty, and sponsors. Audretsch’s lecture, “A Place for Entrepreneurship or Entrepreneurship for a Place” investigates knowledge spillover, and how an institution can support entrepreneurship.
Audretsch started the lecture by stating how inspired he was by Beloit’s energy and commitment to both intellectual inquiry and honest, tolerable communication. He was less inspired, however, by Beloit’s cold, dark November nights.
After the rise of globalization in the world, countries were left to face the consequences, where the old “formula” for prosperity didn’t work, and stagnation occurred. The solution to these trends was simple: innovation. What wasn’t so simple was how countries can get that innovation.
There were two common approaches to how innovation occurred. The first accounted innovation to pure luck, that there were no factors that could influence innovation, similar to ideas just dropping from the sky. This approach proved less than ideal, since if innovation was truly just luck, that belief gets the world nowhere. The second approach believed that innovation can be cultivated by providing both culture and growth, but even this approach wasn’t without its road bumps.
Places that had attempted to provide technology, capital, and entrepreneurs ran into two main problems. The first was that entrepreneurs simply left. Despite universities providing the correct “ingredients for innovation,” entrepreneurs would get their start, then move to new areas. The second challenge was that areas did not all agree on which ideas were good ideas. Potential ideas would then be stopped before they could truly hit the ground running. Audretsch expanded on this second challenge, citing “the knowledge filter,” where big, legacy firms either fail to see an innovative idea, or they reject one to preserve the status quo.
Audretsch left the audience with an interesting dichotomy, whether entrepreneurship was for a place, or if a place is for entrepreneurship, and how both solve the prior challenges.
To solve entrepreneurs simply leaving, Audretsch suggests that they must really like and connect the area. Audretsch provides Diane Hendricks as an example of an entrepreneur being connected to a place, reminding everyone of her vast investments in the city of Beloit.
To face the challenge of the knowledge filter, an area must be able to promote ideas, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Only then can a place even begin to take a step in the right direction towards innovation.
Following the lecture, I approached Audretsch asking for any takeaways that someone not in the field of business and economics could learn from entrepreneurship. “I believe that entrepreneurship is not solely about business, but rather entrepreneurship is about deviance,” Audretsch said. He went on to explain that without people deviating from the norm, no real growth can be made. Of course, many times deviance fails, but when it succeeds, it succeeds well. Entrepreneurship is about taking that risk for progress.
Audretsch ended the lecture with a reference to Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” leaving a remark for the students in the audience: “You all have miles to go before you sleep.”
Featured Image: David Audretsch via Beloit College
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