Youth Entrepreneurship in Switzerland
This is a story of young entrepreneurship.
Three 16-year-olds, friends at their high school in Switzerland, identify what they perceive to be a need at their school, and probably at many other schools: a professionally designed and managed website to permit students to evaluate and provide constructive support and feedback to their teachers. They work together rapidly to gather inputs from teachers and classmates, create the website, design the questionnaire (based on what was used at a local university), produce a great video, test the site with a few classmates, launch it, and over a thousand of their peers provide evaluations within a few days. The day after it is launched the school administration invites them for a meeting to congratulate them on their achievement, offer recommendations on improvements, and ask how the school and the students might take their startup and leverage it across the Swiss school system. Success!!
Not.
No, our young entrepreneurs made a few mistakes, the most important of which was in stakeholder management, namely the school administration, and eventually the teacher’s union and the politician responsible for education. But this is something that one learns from and improves on for one’s next venture. Fail fast, fail forward! Few successful entrepreneurs have not made mistakes and had numerous failures. That’s the nature of working with the unknown and trying something new. It is a sine qua non for moving society forward.
The real issue in this story is how the school administration responded. The day after the site’s launch the boys were pulled out of class without warning and thrust in front of the entire management of the school, and they were not in a good mood: “How dare you? There is no law that says that you are allowed to do what you did! Who do you think you are? You’re just children and have no right to do this, nor the competence. Shut the site down immediately!”
Subsequently the boys were suspended temporarily from school, a “teachable moment” was lost, and Swiss society stayed where it was.
We often ask “Where is the Swiss Google?, Why don’t we have more Swiss entrepreneurs? What happened to today’s manifestations of Henri Nestlé, Fritz Hoffmann and Alfred Escher?”. We blame the lack of growth financing. We cite the obtuse capital taxation laws. We complain that Swiss entrepreneurs don’t think big, and that investors are risk-averse. These are critical issues that must and will be solved, but if our school system teaches our children to only do what they’re told, we have to accept that a Google, Apple, Skype, Free, etc is unlikely to happen in Switzerland. When the role models in our schools, professionals that these kids look up to, tell our teenagers that they have no right to try something new, to dare, to take a leap into the unknown, then it is incumbent on parents, friends and other leaders to support these budding entrepreneurs.
Without them society stagnates.
Formatrice, facilitatrice et coach
7 年Interesting article. What I am not clear about is what is meant by “to permit students to evaluate and provide constructive support and feedback to their teachers”. Did the students evaluate the teachers, the course content, the school administration? The teachers were involved: why did they not mention it to the school administration to check that the site was aligned with the school values and program. I am not sure that pulling the kids of the class and suspending them will help with the image of the school. At least the students asked for help to create the questionnaires. I encountered a similar situation unfortunately the questionnaire used was badly designed and questions only asked about feeling and were not specific enough to be able to draw any action plan. I thanked the students for their proactivity but could not use any information given and had to rely on our “oral” meetings to get more insight.
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7 年Interested in agency - [email protected]
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8 年Jim, thanks for this. I think this is one of the root causes of where we are today. We see this not only in the lack of the enterpreneurial but also in the coporate world where ,adaptation capability, is a crucial skill to climb up the coporate ladder, but it does not help the business as it grows more of the same...really think the need for changing this mindset is allover...lets solve/tackle it together. By the way Katherine Milligan (head WEF foundation) says how social enterpreneurship of the future should be: system changing (enterpreneurship).
Today I listen LSD La sourie déglinguée toujours à la mode, je crois.et vous ? Espoir, toujours
Hi Jim, I couldn't agree more with your conclusions as well as with the difficulty to 'teach entrepreneurship'. The only thing I would love to add is that science 'hijacks' too much of the innovation scene in this country and we certainly need more of go-to-market and respect for the work of entrepreneurs. They are the ones translating inventions/ideas into (economic)value, which in my opinion is real innovation and should be used as the real base for measuring innovation performance instead of IP per capita.