Entrepreneurs often rely on industry experts and specialized people to carry out their projects. This combination is essential to create excellent products and develop projects that, in addition to having economic purposes, also have humanitarian purposes. Collaboration is vital to achieve great results.
The strong drive to find solutions to specific technical problems motivates the collaboration. For the company, it appears to rely on the experience and knowledge of technicians. For him, the vision and the human and monetary investment of the entrepreneur are fundamental.
Find balance in activities
Often entrepreneurs are also professors. We can find many names by researching, from McCarthy, father of AI, to many other computer science professors, philosophers, and those who have created innovative solutions in university labs.
Livio Valenti, founder of Vaxess Technology, connected to the world of Harvard, studies new systems to create and disseminate vaccines with increasingly innovative technologies. His relationship with Harvard University has lasted for years, and to admits that this collaboration has allowed him to achieve great goals.
He and Dave Berque, a computer science professor at DePauw University who started as an entrepreneur. Obviously, explains Berque, he was not comfortable explaining commercial products useful for research but then the combination became natural. The same explains Omid Farokhzad, who is involved in 3 startups, certified 60 patents, and runs a 25-person laboratory in nanomedicine and biomaterials at the Women’s Hospital in Boston. Farokhzad understood that his vocation was the academic world and not companies.
The list is long, and the names to be listed are long. Some entrepreneurs have left companies’ leadership to devote themselves to academia and research, others collaborate on both levels, and still others collaborate with universities without losing sight of their companies.
It is easier for entrepreneurs to explain that there are, also showing concrete examples that are more understandable to students. Students also see the passion transmitted for a specific sector, which pushes them to want to emulate the path followed by the professor.
Students and then CEOs, the numbers speak for themselves
It is also interesting to find out which courses have worked best in training the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. Hottopics HT highlights a list of professors and universities who have qualified the most significant number of current corporate CEOs. The graph shows how 11 students left Harvard and became CEO, 9 from Stanford University, 9 from Pennsylvania and 4 from Berkeley.
The people named wanted to write the same thing differently. Not to see being an entrepreneur as a limited academic but rather to put one’s skills at the service of teaching and research. Another piece of advice is to be free direction, and clarify your extracurricular commitments and the time to devote to. Being transparent always rewards.
