The Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship

 

Robert Lue

 

For too long we have separated what is traditionally called the liberal arts from what is often called entrepreneurship training.  The usual silos that these two aspects of learning are placed in reflect the long-standing false dichotomy between the academy and the workplace.  The era of academics being somehow separated from the world of work is long gone.  It has been replaced by a society where individuals change their careers multiple times and often move between the spheres of academia and the workplace or have feet in both.  The rate of change in both academia and the workplace is also faster than at any other time in human history.  So it is essential that higher education integrate the knowledge and skills from both domains to equip our students for a more dynamic world where they are not constrained intellectually to what has traditionally been in one or the other.

 

The liberal arts were originally meant to express the broadest swath of human thought and experience, yet somehow the skills and habits of mind of the workplace became gradually separated from this curriculum.  This left students to tackle each domain in sequence; first the liberal arts and then workplace skills.  This unnecessary sequencing has contributed to the so called skills gap, and while business leaders uniformly value the analytical and leadership skills that can emerge from a liberal arts education they nevertheless bemoan the need to upskill our graduates in preparation for work.

 

The Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship (C&E) is designed to integrate essential skills in and approaches to creativity and entrepreneurship throughout Harvard’s liberal arts curriculum, thereby erasing the false dichotomy.  It has three interwoven components that collectively are meant to promote an actionable understanding of creativity and entrepreneurship among students as well as faculty.  In the case of students the program will allow them to draw on what they learn in their liberal arts courses and apply them to challenges of their choosing prepared with a set of basic skills in entrepreneurship.  Likewise, faculty will have supported opportunities to connect their disciplines to mechanisms of accelerating creativity and the development of entrepreneurial projects by their students.  In both cases the program has a thematic emphasis on the development of actionable proposals by students that address current challenges and create social and/or economic value for society.  The three components are:

 

1.  Fostering systemic student innovation.  In order to engage the broadest swath of students in C&E efforts regardless of discipline, a new 2-credit C&E seminar will be offered in both the fall and spring terms beginning in the 2020-21 academic year. Students that are inspired in any of their 4-credit courses by an idea that they would like to develop into an entrepreneurial endeavor would take the seminar potentially for a full year and in parallel with their standard course load.  In each term, the seminar will have two parallel tracks, with students selecting the track that is most appropriate based on their stage of entrepreneurial development.  

 

The Skills Track will focus on four areas essential to harnessing creativity for entrepreneurship:  Data Science and Entrepreneurship; Ideation and Teamwork; Business Plan Development and Strategy; Communications and Relationships.  Training in these four areas will empower students to use evidence to define a problem and interrogate possible solutions, work with others to ideate and create an approach, build a rigorous business/organizational strategy, and communicate their ideas while building the requisite relationships for success. The Skills Track will be taught by a combination of faculty and invited practitioners, and will be well suited to students just beginning to explore entrepreneurship.  Robert Lue, the faculty lead of the Lemann Program, will be the course head for the first iteration of the seminar.

 

The Project Track will focus on projects that individual students or teams are ready to move beyond the initial proposal phase.  These students will receive more bespoke mentoring from program staff as the projects develop and will be paired with relevant advisors drawn from the C&E Advisory Board (described below in part 3). This track will also focus on issues related to fostering the relevant partnerships in support of project funding and execution. While students will enroll in one track or the other, the seminar will be an integrated learning community such that students from the Skills Track can engage teams working the Project Track, while students in the Project Track can still access the training in the Skills Track.

 

The C&E seminar is designed for maximal flexibility to better meet students where they are in their creative development.  Many students will take the Skills Track one term and follow through to the Project Track the next term to move their projects forward.  By offering both tracks every term, a student can start whenever inspiration strikes with the Skills Track and continue into the following term with the Project Track or take a break for a term or more if necessary.  Some students may only wish to participate in the Skills Track while others may already have well developed ideas, including from allied C&E courses or programs (described below in part 2), and jump right into the Project Track.

 

A final component will be the opportunity for any 4-credit FAS course in any discipline to affiliate with the C&E seminar such that students taking the former can develop proposals using the skills provided in the latter.  This will allow entrepreneurial thinking to surface anywhere in the curriculum while allowing FAS faculty to continue to focus on their disciplinary areas of expertise. Faculty teaching the affiliated 4-credit course will be expected to meet with their students developing a proposal in the C&E seminar and provide feedback from a disciplinary viewpoint.  In time, this will inspire more faculty to mount 4-credit C&E courses like the ones described below as they are exposed through their students to the pedagogy of the seminar.

 

2.  Fostering disciplinary student innovation.  A few disciplinary courses already exist in the curriculum that have significant components of entrepreneurship.  The program will support these existing courses along with the development and execution of new 4-credit C&E courses that are based on a challenge-driven pedagogy.  In these courses students learn concepts and skills from a particular discipline, but in the context of developing actionable proposals to address challenges, either of their own choosing or provided by the instructor or collaborating organization.  These courses will give faculty members from any FAS field the opportunity to offer a challenge-driven course where the ideas and approaches of their field are integrated with a project-based approach to developing entrepreneurial proposals.  

 

Entrepreneurial thinking amongst our students should not be fostered only within the walls of Harvard. Today’s problems and attendant opportunities to create value cross both geographic and cultural borders.  Thus, the C&E program will also work with existing FAS programs, both in study abroad and internships, that also have a project-based approach to developing actionable solutions.  Students will have the opportunity to integrate phases of the C&E seminar either leading up to or following on from their international experience.  In time and with additional resources, specific C&E programs could be set up at a handful of sites around the world to allow students to experience a global perspective and range of opportunities for entrepreneurship.

 

3.  Fostering an innovation community.   The fostering of an intergenerational community of entrepreneurship in the FAS will be a sustained outcome of the program.  At the end of each semester there will be a Festival of Ideas where students present the proposals they have developed, either in a 4-credit disciplinary C&E course or from the combination of any FAS course/program and the 2-credit C&E seminar.  This will have the character of an entrepreneurship hackathon where potential funders as well as the wider Harvard community will have the opportunity to learn about and engage with student projects.  A subset of suitable projects will have the opportunity to continue development in the HBS iLab and/or participate in other competitions for external funding.

 

Three-day developmental workshops for faculty designed with the explicit outcome of generating new C&E courses.  The first two will focus on the “Humanities and Entrepreneurship” and “Data Science and Entrepreneurship.”  Participants will include FAS, HBS and HKS faculty, as well as external experts.  They will be developed in collaboration with the Mahindra Center for the Humanities and the Harvard Data Science Initiative respectively.  

 

The Lemann Program is situated in the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Office of Undergraduate Education.  Dedicated Bok staff will support the establishment and maintenance of the network of expertise that will teach in the C&E seminar and provide guidance to students as their proposals develop.  The network will include the C&E Advisory Board that represents a wide span of expertise in the non-profit and for profit domains.  Members will include highly engaged Harvard alumni, faculty from other Harvard schools, private business, local government, and a variety of non-profit organizations. The goal is to pair every C&E student proposal with a board member that has the relevant expertise to provide meaningful feedback as well as connections to other sources of advice and even potential funding.

 

Finally, situating the program in the Bok Center will provide full course design support and the Learning Lab more specifically will provide student training in public presentation and the software for media design and development.  Bok staff will also provide supporting reference materials and briefings as part of the development workshops for faculty and students.