Dawn of the Edupreneurial Revolution

“I believe that we will look back at this decade as the beginning of an economic revolution as important as the scientific revolution in the 16th century and the industrial revolution in the 18th century. We’re standing at the beginning of the entrepreneurial revolution.” Fred Wilson, AVC.com, pointed me to the Steve Blank Blog that begins with this prediction and continues, “This is a revolution that will permanently reshape business as we know it and more importantly, change the quality of life across the entire planet for all who come after us.”

Blank identifies the factors that made Silicon Valley center of the entrepreneurial universe. He points to the historical barriers to innovation that have largely been dismantled, and outlines the democratization of entrepreneurship.  Key factors including:

• Compressing the product development cylce
• Startups built for thousands rather than millions of dollars
• The new structure of the VC industry
• Entrepreneurship  as its own management science
• Consumer internet driving innovation

Blank suggests that the Great Recession increased the pace of start ups and “while innovation is moving at Internet speed, this won’t be limited to just internet commerce startups. It will spread to the enterprise and ultimately every other business segment.”

He may be right about entrepreneurship in general; I’m quite sure it’s dawn of the edupreneurial revolution.  Steve thinks the entrepreneurial revolution will remain based in the U.S.  I’m less certain that the U.S. will remain the center of the learning technology revolution.  Our system is so calcified that it’s quite possible that we’ll see the major innovations occurring in counties that bypass batch-print Bismarckian schooling and go straight to personal digital learning.

Read Steve’s post and tell me how much of it will be true in the US learning space.

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