Professor Gnanaharan

April 2007

In an interview to The Hindu Business Line, dated 23rd April 2007, Prof. T.N. Srinivasan, currently the Samuel J. Park Jr Professor of Economics at Yale University was asked a question: "Does innovation lead to entrepreneurship or is it the other way around, entrepreneurship leading to innovation?” Prof. Srinivasan's answer is quite prescriptive in terms of outlining the role of entrepreneurship education both in promoting innovation in academic campuses and growth in the world outside. He said:

"It's a two-way relationship. In one sense innovation, somebody finds something but that somebody may not be equipped to translate that something into a commercial proposition that is where the entrepreneurship comes in. The entrepreneur identifies this idea. You may produce the idea, but you may not have the capital or the skills to find out what the market is. But as an entrepreneur, I may find that I can borrow your idea and do it. The outside of the story is what you are saying - if there was no innovation at all, what's the point in entrepreneurs. But the entrepreneur himself could be an innovator; there, the two functions combine."

Traditionally, management and entrepreneurship as areas of study and practice were considered independent of one another. It was the venerable management guru, Peter F. Drucker who visualized them as two sides of the same coin. He famously observed: “Management and entrepreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same task. An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not last long”.

Rightly, Drucker and other management experts viewed innovation as a defining character of entrepreneurs. Innovative capacity is supposed to differentiate the successful entrepreneurs from the not so successful ones. This explains why the terms entrepreneurship and innovation are used interchangeably. A relook at what Drucker said about management and entrepreneurship clears much of the ground. While he expects every entrepreneur to be a good manager as well, he uses the term management - not manager – to emphasize the need to be proficient in innovation. Implicitly, he indicates the possibility or necessity of outsourcing innovation.

Prof. Srinivasan’s observation about entrepreneurship and innovation has to be looked at in this backdrop. Management education is imparted or considered necessary for those who are aspiring for a career in management as well as for the practicing managers (without formal management education) besides the entrepreneurs. In the same way, entrepreneurship education should be given to entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs as well as to those who want to become innovation professionals or practitioners.

Like management consultancies, a new breed of professional innomediaries should proliferate. Prof. Srinivasan’s thinking on the subject indicates this underlying trend. For long, we had a rare breed of people called inventors on the one side and entrepreneurs on the other – those who commercialize the inventions of the scientists. Rarely we see them in one person. In the same way, there would be a horde of people who innovate and those who leverage those innovations by setting up ventures.

Here, innovators include business model or concept innovators as well as management innovators. Unlike in the case of scientific inventors who rarely become successful entrepreneurs, more business or management innovators will morph into successful entrepreneurs. But at the same time, there is a tremendous scope and a dire necessity to create innovation professionals and innomediaries through well-conceived and well structured entrepreneurship education programmes focusing mainly on INNOVATION.