Back to Boulder: Why innovation and entrepreneurship matter
I'm just back from a trip to Naropa University, a small liberal arts university in Boulder, Colorado, nestled at the base of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
It was a nostalgic trip as much as it was a new beginning. It's been more than 12 years since I last visited Naropa, where I worked for about a decade during the exciting dot.com period wherein the business accelerator Techstars was launched in Boulder. And this, my return visit, would be for the amazing opportunity to join the board of trustees of the university.
While heading up continuing education for Naropa in the early 2000s, I encountered a number of innovative leaders from the tech sector as well as startups from across different industries.
I didn't know it at the time, but Naropa and Boulder were planting the seeds of entrepreneurship within me that would later inform my work at College of DuPage and eventually lead to the birth to the regional business incubator and accelerator now known as Innovation DuPage.
Here are some ways that those seeds continue to grow:
Over the past 12 years with College of DuPage, I've had the good fortune to meet hundreds if not thousands of regional employers. At the same time, I've worked with an extremely talented team to develop short-term training programs to help keep employees up to date on the professional and technical skills needed to not just stay competitive, but to lead their industries.
The training trend that I do not see going away is the call from employers to incorporate innovative solution-based thinking; in other words, leveraging an entrepreneurial mindset.
Typically we think of exciting tech startups when we think of entrepreneurship, but the reality is that entrepreneurs also run restaurants, retail stores and provide a whole host of services in addition to starting tech firms. Increasingly, all companies are tech enabled, as the World Economic Forum reminds us that we are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, wherein rapid change requires increased interconnectivity across industries and between customers and the service providers and product makers.
Simply stated, entrepreneurship is critical to innovation across all sectors.
The culture of innovation is also picking up steam across higher education institutions. At the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship's (NACCE) recent annual conference in Boston, COD President Dr. Brian Caputo joined a panel of college presidents discussing the need for innovative teaching and learning in the skilled trades.
This February in Nashville, the National Council for Continuing Education and Training (NCCET) will continue this focus of the evolving role of higher education as a provider of innovative programs, services and solutions. Innovation DuPage and College of DuPage efforts were highlighted at the NACCE conference and will be featured again at the NCCET conference next February.
For the economic prosperity of the greater Chicagoland suburbs, focusing on the entrepreneurial mindset, combined with sharing business best practices through education and training, is paramount. As both employers and educators, we have to be obsessed with finding new ways to solve business challenges while designing innovative programs and methods of teaching to prepare tomorrow's leaders for growth and prosperity.
Academia, industry and government economic development stakeholders must work together like never before to ensure our region and nation remain uniquely qualified to invent the solutions and services that differentiate the United States from other markets.
For me, this evolution of thought started in Boulder, Colorado, some 20 years ago, though the need for entrepreneurial thinking is more germane (here and now) than ever.
• Joseph Cassidy, MBA, is Assistant Vice President, Economic Development Dean, Continuing Education and Public Services at College of DuPage. For more information, please visit: https://www.cod.edu/academics/continuing-education/career-professional-training/
https://www.innovationdupage.org/
https://www.cod.edu/hsti/