Education and Entrepreneurship

Extract from

Winfried Weber, Die Purpose-Wirtschaft, 2024, eBook (Amazon Kindle, http://tiny.cc/9eznzz ) (Translation by the author)

"Many people are bored or burnt out after 30 years in the business world. And they can take risks again at that age because the house is paid off and retirement is near. Just like me. My four children are all out of school and now I want to do something useful for society. It's a shame that no one encourages and helps people over 50 to retrain for another profession. ... The work as a teacher will be incredibly hard. ... For people who are used to management salaries, the pay is of course also a deterrent. Beginners like me don't get much more than 20,000 pounds a year. Some of our applicants [from her foundation 'Now Teach'] are earning half a million so far. When I told a prospect about the 20,000 pounds, he asked: Is that per month?"

Lucy Kellaway, former senior business editor of the Financial Times and co-founder of the Now Teach Foundation (Kellaway 2017)

Education needs innovation and entrepreneurship. This has a long tradition. Socrates, Pestalozzi, Humboldt, Fröbel, Grundtvig, Dewey, Steinbeis, Baden-Powell, Piaget, Montessori, Korczak, Freinet, Miller, Illich and many other entrepreneurs created and continue to create an education for freedom and the basis for individuals to find and realize the purpose of their lives.

Socrates' mother was a midwife, a maia. His dialogical approach, maieutics, helps people to find out explanations for phenomena themselves by asking clever questions. Johann Pestalozzi's elementary education to strengthen people and develop their independence. Wilhelm von Humboldt's Königsberg school plan as a three-tier education system with elementary, school and university levels. Friederich Fröbel's discovery of the importance of early childhood. Nikolai Grundtvig's promotion of lifelong learning. John Dewey's democracy education and learning with projects and learning by doing. Ferdinand von Steinbeis' development of dual education and the establishment of trade schools. Robert Baden-Powell with the Boy Scouts, their snowball system and self-organization, which "works if you let it". Jean Piaget's focus on imitation in learning. Montessori's promotion of concentrated attention and the "preparatory environment". Janusz Korczak's "humorous pedagogy" and self-management in the children's republic, where children learn to practice democracy and coexistence. Célestin Freinet's structural innovations for schools, changing them from the inside, activating the team spirit of teachers and creating learning cooperatives in which people shape the learning process together. Alice Miller's critique of a black pedagogy in which children are seen as subjects and can be manipulated as puppets by those in power. Ivan Illich's radical plea for de-schooling, home schooling, which is currently practiced by over three percent of pupils in the USA, for example. An immense diversity.

Today, there are no limits to the differentiation of learning innovations. Dozens, hundreds or thousands of entrepreneurs in start-ups, foundations and in voluntary work are working on educational innovations not only in every OECD country but also in the Global South. Entrepreneurs are developing concepts for new structures in administration and learning organizations, working on methods, motivational issues, crossing boundaries in which learners become teachers and so on.

The dynamism of a society's education sector depends to a large extent on whether an ecosystem for social innovation is created in which entrepreneurial approaches support, complement and sometimes even irritate public institutions. Education as a system needs openness, autonomy and freedom for self-organization. However, public education also needs the right incentives for organizations, teachers and start-ups on the part of politicians and, in education management, a focus on motivational issues or, more precisely, a greater sensitivity to demotivation. Too often, public education is managed in such a way that teachers are demotivated.

Why did Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, donate a billion dollars to Montessori kindergartens?

"The multi-billionaire attended a Montessori preschool himself as a child and, according to his mother, Jeff liked to immerse himself so deeply in a task that no one could dissuade him. Maria Montessori speaks here of the 'polarization of attention' and sees this immersion as an elementary learning and being experience for the child, which is of inestimable value for his development. In being completely absorbed in an activity, the child and the world are no longer separated from each other, but have become a fruitful unity. Bezos himself said many years later that he owed his success precisely to this focus and spirit of research that he was able to develop so freely at the Montessori school." (Laschitz)

Jeff Bezos has something in common with Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Will Wright, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and, decades earlier, Alexander Graham Bell, Erik Erikson and Peter Drucker. They either attended a Montessori institution and were allowed to start their lives with unconventional learning experiences or they were Montessori teachers themselves. Bezos was not the only one to support the Montessori movement. From 1913 onwards Bell was am early patron of the movement.

Peter Drucker gives a decisive indication of how and where entrepreneurship could make a difference in the education sector:

„For thousands of years people have been talking about improving teaching - to no avail. It was not until the early years of this century, however, that an educator asked, “What is the end product?” Then the answer was obvious: It is not teaching. It is, of course, learning. And then the same educator, the great Italian doctor and teacher Maria Montessori (1870-1952), began to apply systematic analysis of the work and systematic integration of the parts into a process.” (Drucker 1973)

Peter Drucker's aunt, Eugenie Schwarzwald (1872-1940), founded the Schwarzwald School in Vienna, with the principles of non-violence, the promotion of imagination and creative power and the free development of every child. She regularly exchanged ideas with Maria Montessori (1870-1952), who began to develop reform pedagogical methods at the same time at the beginning of the 20th century. Drucker wrote about his elementary school days at the Black Forest School: "it was [...] superior to anything the Gymnasium tried to teach me." (Drucker 1989)

An astonishing number of entrepreneurs and managers have developed a great affinity for the teaching profession during their careers and have been involved with innovations in learning. The practice of leading organizations has many parallels to the tasks in schools. In the knowledge society, it is important for people to be able to learn independently and work in teams and to be able to communicate with others and explain to others what their knowledge and skills are. Those who do not find communicative connections do not generate innovation and do not apply knowledge.

In the knowledge age, innovation and complexity are two sides of the same coin for educational institutions in the process of renewal. Innovation also arises in the education sector through opening up. In many countries, schools in particular have reached a point where incremental, i.e. linear, step-by-step improvements and attempts to reduce complexity have reached their limits. Schools everywhere are suffering from social overload. Even with small changes, change managers encounter a system that is unwilling or unable to reform, within the school, its administrations and supervisory authorities and outside, with the countless interest groups in the education system.

Radical renewal can be achieved with three levers. The first, most important change is the provision of autonomy. Of the almost 30,000 general education schools in Germany, a critical mass of a few hundred schools would be needed, with a cross-section of all school types, which would be prepared to renew themselves with an entrepreneurial approach. Entrepreneurial means that a school is given the freedom and autonomy to independently implement innovations that already exist in thousands of teachers' heads and drawers. With Change Project, these schools act autonomously, free from the school supervisory authorities and with greater leeway in terms of curricula. Each school is given its own budget, schools are given a new legal form in the medium term (for example as individual foundations of the federal states), the opportunity to choose the members and partners of their organization themselves and their own statutes with the goals and specific results they want to achieve in their diverse social spaces (from socially deprived areas to middle-class neighbourhoods). The learning outcomes of the model schools are regularly evaluated, taking into account the pupils' initial social situation and learning requirements.

A model school initiative could be launched by the federal states or the federal government and get underway via the federal states through an application process in which school teams break down their innovation ideas and competencies. The federal government would initially provide considerable additional funding to kick-start the initiative, which could be replaced in the long term by streamlining bureaucracy at state level. In other areas of society, such as nursing care, there is evidence from other countries that nursing care start-ups with their lean structures manage with around a third of the administrative and management costs (see "Nurse entrepreneurship" chapter). This would mean that, in the long term, a one to two-digit billion amount could be freed up annually for a flat hierarchical school system if schools learn to manage and renew themselves. An intranet platform would be set up at federal and/or state level for advisory projects for the initial 1,500 or so model schools, which would initially be available to this group with active participation. These schools would then be learning organizations and learning systems. Existing communication barriers would be dissolved through the day-to-day internal networking of the model schools.

To date, the education system in many OECD countries has mostly attempted to get to grips with social complexity through growing bureaucracy and increasingly detailed regulations with distributed responsibilities and often unclear procedures and processes as a result. Educational policy debates and legislative initiatives also repeatedly lead to demotivation, fatalism and professional reorientation among teachers at the lower levels of the school system. Satisfaction with working and training conditions is deteriorating. In addition, unprofessional ad hoc crisis management by the upper school authorities in the face of major social crises such as refugee crises, the pandemic, inclusion or a shortage of skilled workers leads to paralysis at the lower levels. A lack of social esteem for teachers, who have often been forced into the role of firefighters at social flashpoints and, from the perspective of a job design of professional personnel management, de facto into killer jobs, does the rest.

The second important change concerns the decision-making process in the organization, which has become more autonomous. This raises the question of who makes decisions, how they come about, whether decision-making processes should be based on traditions and, if so, which ones. Educational innovations are then also largely created by the intrapreneurs of an educational institution, who design, implement and evaluate innovative models in change projects. Self-reflection is also important in order to create opportunities to reflect on and reverse decision-making patterns. In this way, all members of the organization can influence decisions and be heard. Involving learners and other stakeholders in the organization also creates innovation. Entrepreneurs also come into play here, using social and educational start-ups to demonstrate how learning innovations can be developed and implemented outside of established educational institutions.

As a result of the first two changes through autonomy and distributed forms of decision-making, new types of conflicts will arise in schools and their teams, which must be professionally managed in order to remain capable of acting. For flat-hierarchical organizations and organizations that allow decentralized decision-making and introduce forms of self-organization, team conflicts are part of everyday life, especially in the transition phase. Teams then need coaching, supervision and advice all the more in order to generate productive solutions from conflicts (see chapter "The source code").

An important factor here is the size of the teams and the organization. For example, the industrial company Gore-Tex, with over 10,000 employees worldwide, has been working with flat hierarchies for over 60 years, largely dispensing with rigid control mechanisms and limiting the number of employees in the separately operating company units, which consist of "associates" with equal rights. Right at the beginning of the company, founder Bill Gore introduced the principle that no Gore plant should have more than 150 employees, or 200 in shift operation. In addition to specifications, there are agreements among the associates. At Gore, so-called "Leaders" are elected by the team for a limited period of time or for the duration of a project, returning to the role of Associate once the task has been completed.

Universities also traditionally organize themselves according to the principle of decentralized faculties and collegial self-organization. This increases participation, but also the amount of communication required from teaching staff, which is essential, especially in knowledge organizations, in order to maintain the "state-of-the-art" and which should not be controlled top-down by hierarchies (the rectorate).

Ultimately, many innovative models in current management and organizational practice and debate can be linked to historical reform pedagogical approaches. In doing so, the innovative school can reflect on the roots of its pioneering thinkers from Socrates to Montessori.

Furthermore, there is ample evidence that innovations in school education, organizational practice and management influence each other. Historical reform pedagogy and committed teachers have also influenced management innovators and the founders of innovative organizational models. The social worker Mary Parker Follett is regarded in North America as the "mother of modern management" (see chapter "The source code").  The start-up Teach First was developed in the USA to broaden the horizons of Ivy League and elite university students in a social year with the reality of school in the country's socially deprived areas and issues of equal opportunities. This also includes later career changers with careers in the business world such as Lucy Kellaway (see above).

The third key area of change concerns future readiness and the ability to deal with an unexpected and unknown future, i.e. asking ourselves what of what we do now will still be relevant tomorrow? For a growing number of teachers, this is nothing new and is already part of everyday life as they muddle through under increasingly difficult conditions. What is new about this challenge is that teaching innovations are no longer carried out by lone wolves or small teams, but in the entire organization, which sees itself as a learning organization, in circular cycles and in exchange with start-ups in the education sector.

What is also new is that in the age of complexity, sustainability is increasingly dependent on schools being embedded in networks. Whereas it used to take "a whole village to raise and educate a child", schools are expanding their scope for action in networks with external entrepreneurs.

The third challenge will therefore be, to summarize the organizational philosophy, "mastering complexity through openness". To put it in Peter Drucker's words - let's replace "business" with "today's school form: "If you weren't already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?" (Peter Drucker's famous question to Jack Welch, CEO of Gene-ral Electric, quoted from Flanigan/Mulligan 2005).

Those who open up schools look around for successful learning elsewhere: where does surprising and incidental learning take place, in this country and elsewhere, how do you encourage learners to become teachers, how do you encourage learners to become teachers (for example in learning groups)? And above all, how does the public educational institution network with the entrepreneurs who bring innovation to learning? If you want to be inspired by the diversity of educational start-ups and innovative networks in this country and elsewhere, take a look at international network hubs such as Ashoka, Skoll Foundation, Tata Social Enterprise Challenge, AN-SES African Network of Social Entrepreneurship Scholars, ESG & Social Innovation at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, LATAM/Latin American Entrepreneurs and now also numerous networks at regional level.

One of the most innovation-oriented countries in the education sector is Denmark, which spends well above the OECD average of 6.4% of gross domestic product on public education (OECD 2022). Since 2012, Denmark has been developing a national innovation policy in which the education system plays a central role. "Education is to increase the innovation capacity: A change of culture in the educational system focusing more on innovation" (Danish Government 2012). In the Danish vocational education and training (VET) program, students are taught innovation in the first part of basic education (grundforløb 1). In the VET subject of innovation, students develop skills to introduce innovative thinking and action through practical problem solving.

In Denmark, innovation is very closely linked to entrepreneurship. In the national strategy for education and training in entrepreneurship from 2010, entrepreneurship in both formal and non-formal learning is part of public education. There is no central funding program for non-formal learning, but funding pots (profits from the national lottery and soccer pots/Udlodningsmidlerne) that can support innovation in youth associations, which is managed by the Danish Youth Council. In addition, the Ministry of Culture supports educational institutions in the area of non-formal learning, for example the folk high schools (højskoler, which, as mentioned at the beginning, can be traced back to Grundtvig) and which can initiate innovation projects.

One ingenious way of creating incentives for educational innovation at universities is to collect key figures. Since 2012, Danish universities have been obliged (sic!) to report to the Ministry of Education what percentage of students in all subject areas have taken part in seminars on innovation and entrepreneurship. While the percentage was initially less than ten percent, some Danish universities now "inoculate" over sixty percent of their students through innovation workshops. University concepts distinguish between incubation and acceleration, between incubation and acceleration phases of entrepreneurial learning and the development of prototypes (see also European Commission 2023).

Those who open up schools and universities are also prepared to be surprised by their learners. The tendency of teachers to set standardized ways of learning as the norm and to repeat these in routine processes is no longer appropriate in the age of complexity. An innovative educational institution, whether primary or secondary schools, vocational schools, universities or adult and continuing education, allows itself to open up and offer many paths to learning success, including through entrepreneurs.

Celestine Freinet, the founder of Freinet's pedagogy, once summarized his pedagogical experiences with this image:

"The pedagogue had worked out his method in the most precise way. He had, he said, quite scientifically built the staircase leading to the different levels of knowledge; with many experiments he had determined the height of the steps in order to adapt them to the normal capacity of children's legs; here and there he had built in a landing to catch one's breath, and beginners could hold on to a comfortable handrail. ... Only those who had already been sufficiently authoritatively influenced by school methodically climbed the stairs step by step, holding on to the banister, catching their breath on the landing. ... But as soon as he was gone for a moment, chaos and disaster reigned! ...The horde of children remembered their instincts and found their needs again: one conquered the stairs ingeniously on all fours; another took two steps at once with verve and skipped the heels; there were even some who tried to climb the stairs backwards and really achieved a certain mastery. Most, however, found - and this is an incomprehensible paradox - that the stairs offered them too little adventure and stimulation. They raced around the house, climbed up the guttering, climbed over the balustrades and reached the roof in record time, better and faster than the so-called methodical staircase; once at the top, they slid down the banisters."

Célestine Freinet, The Wisdom of Mathieu the Shepherd (Les dits de Mathieu)