David Audretsch, distinguished professor at Indiana University and director of the Institute for Development Strategies, was the guest speaker of the most recent “IST Distinguished Lecture”, held last Thursday, July 8, under the American Corner@IST, and in collaboration with the Department of Engineering and Management (DEG). The lecture “Linking Entrepreneurship to Innovation and Job Creation” took place in virtual format, via Zoom.
Using very practical examples, professor David Audretsch highlighted the role of entrepreneurship as a crucial bridge between idea generation and its commercialization, thus influencing innovation and job creation.
The speaker shared that throughout his training, in the various American universities and colleges he attended, and even when he studied Economics, he never or very rarely heard of “entrepreneurship”, “innovation” and “job creation.” “In fact, I studied in the 70s, but all the thinking, all the ideas, and the perception was that we were in the second industrial age”, he said. “People certainly didn’t think about entrepreneurship. They thought about factories and the people who worked there, because that was driving the economic growth and success at that time,” he said.
Professor David Audretsch also recalled Romano Prodi’s speech at the Instituto de Empresa Madrid, in 2002, while he was president of the European Union: “Our lacunae in the field of entrepreneurship needs to be taken seriously because there is mounting evidence that the key to economic growth and productivity improvements lies in the entrepreneurial capacity of an economy.”
Professor David Audretsch gave some examples of innovation that didn’t get to market due to a lack of entrepreneurial vision. The professor recalled that the first personal computer was developed by Xerox, at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), but it has never been marketed due to a lack of belief in its viability, and SAP, whose software is developed in the IBM ecosystem. “All these innovations, R&D, education, human capital, and cultural experiences that contributed to creativity, would lie dormant. It required the intervention of an entrepreneur or entrepreneurs to take this idea out of the organizational context where it was created”, he stressed.
Using infographics about the workforce in the Detroit and Silicon Valley, the speaker showed the great disparities between the two regions. “Silicon Valley creates lot of jobs. We must note that, in addition to the jobs, the gains are also more than double. These are the so-called good jobs”, he stressed. “We can also see that in Detroit, they’re still focused on physical capital, which is not necessarily bad, but we all know what is the most important contributor to economic growth and where the future lies. It was the third industrial age, but now it has become the fourth”. “My conclusion is that innovation matters”, he stressed.
Professor David Audretsch ended his lecture by quoting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do”.
