The Innovative Coworking Spaces of 15th-Century Italy
by Piero Formica

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To translate educational concepts into an entrepreneurial context requires a meeting of hearts and minds, unfettered by preconceived ideas and outmoded powerbases. There are plentiful public and private initiatives to encourage new businesses in every field. This is matched by increasing activity in academic thought.   A growing number of academics, practitioners and business people are aiming to broaden and as well as deepen their knowledge of how business and economies function. The generalist or polymath, so apparent in the Renaissance, is becoming more prevalent.   This is the context in which coworking spaces are on the rise, from Google’s “Campus” in London to NextSpace in California. Much has been made of these shared workspaces […]

Managing the Transition to an Entrepreneurial Society
by Isabella Mader and Wolfgang Müller

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Entrepreneurial Society seems to evolve in such a way that a society of employees slowly morphs into a society of entrepreneurs. The tendency of a decrease in employment and the rise of freelancing materialized in a record of 40 percent of US workers in insecure contingent jobs in 2015 [1]. The future of work seems to be that employment is dying altogether, but work seems to be re-inventing itself through the rise of freelancing: while corporations are laying of millions of staff they appear to be sourcing work back in from freelancers. On the one hand, the network economy can be the chance for millions to create work for themselves in a self-responsible manner; on […]

Make bets not plans
by Dagmar Woyde-Koehler

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Plans define a special relationship between people and the future. Plans attempt to anticipate the future and make life predictable and even controllable. A plan is predicated on both these premises while also awakening expectations that the goals it sets can be achieved and sustained. Such characteristics are shared equally by the business plans made in the corporate sector and the life plans made by individual people. Bets, on the other hand, are clearly recognized as assumptions and suppositions that always include the possibility that something else might happen quite different to what has been predicted. Bets are based on probabilities and possibilities. Someone making a bet is always well aware that they can lose, […]

Simply Thinking – Judgment and Jack
by Henry Mintzberg

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Remember judgment? It still appears in the dictionary (in my Oxford: “1 the critical faculty, discernment… 2 good sense”). Judgment used to be a key to managing effectively, even if hidden in the dark recesses of the human brain. And then along came measurement, in the dazzling light. It was a good idea, so long as it informed judgment. Too frequently, however, it replaced judgement.   In 1981, the Business Roundtable, a grouping of the chief executives of America’s leading companies, issued their “Statement on Corporate Responsibility.”   The shareholder must receive a good return but the legitimate concerns of other constituencies (customers, employees, communities, suppliers and society at large) also must have the appropriate […]

Policymakers and Entrepreneurial Hubs: This is what can be done
by Mark Esposito, Terence Tse*

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Entrepreneurship is vital to growing markets. And across most of Europe, entrepreneurship is lacking because of poor macro economic conditions, which push investment away from the Old Continent or re-direct all the available capital into savings rather than FDI.  In 2013, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that in Europe’s largest economies, only 6% of the working population set up or ran a new business.[1] By contrast, in BRIC countries and the U.S., 10%-17% engaged in this kind of early-state entrepreneurial activity. Europe’s paucity of substantial investment in innovation highlights the urgent need for European businesses and governments to work together to develop a new entrepreneurial innovation model to tackle financial deficits, create financial stability, and […]

First we need to wake up
by Raymond Hofmann

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Hosted by the Swiss Management Association (SMG), a audience of roughly 100 senior executives met in Zurich for the first Swiss Drucker Forum launch event. The evening’s theme was “rediscovering entrepreneurial management”. Peter Drucker observed: “We know that theories, values, and all the artefacts of human minds and human hands do age and rigidify, becoming obsolete, becoming ‘afflictions’”. This is also true for management. Traditional management is becoming an “affliction” for many organisations. It buries their innate “entrepreneurial competence” (Drucker) under layers of bureaucracy. The interactive panel, moderated by Lukas Michel, Associate Drucker Society Europe, discussed the changes needed if established organisations are to become more entrepreneurial again. Panel members were Tammy Erickson, Executive Fellow […]

Organizing for Simultaneous Innovation Capability – key findings from +1,000 companies
by Magnus Penker

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After collecting and studying innovation data from over 1,000 companies in 62 countries, I’m often asked whether Small and Midsize Enterprises (SME) are more innovative and entrepreneurial than larger corporations. In times when the market dynamics, technology development, and diffusion are faster then ever, it is a natural question. So let´s dig into some key findings and see what we can learn.   All companies have a conscious or unconscious strategy, leadership, culture, capabilities, and competencies they use to improve and innovate business internally (e.g. processes) and externally (e.g. value proposition). According to Steve Coley (2009) the innovation work can be divided into three parallel Horizons, each one representing an S-Curve. The first Horizon 1 […]

Why ‘Modern’ Work Culture Makes People So Miserable
by Jeffrey Pfeffer

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Today’s new deal at work reprises work schemes of the late 1800’s, plus a few meaningless perks.   Dan Lyons’ account of his time at the software company HubSpot describes a workplace in which employees are disposable, “treated as if they are widgets to be used up and discarded.” And HubSpot is scarcely unique: The description of Amazon’s work environment is just one of many similar cases. An increasing number of companies offer snacks, foosball, and futuristic jargon to keep employees’ minds off their long hours and omnipresent economic insecurity.   Whether that works, and for how long, is an open question.   Of course, in the new economy ever fewer companies hire people like Lyons as employees in […]