Entrevista a Michael Schrage en Ubiquity:
UBIQUITY: Is there any particular academic institution that's particularly good at helping people come up with business models that encourage innovation?
SCHRAGE: No, and I say this as a member of them. I think academic institutions are not great at ex ante business models, they're only good in an ex post mode. Business schools are like pathologists: we do our best work with dead patients. What academics do, and what business schools do, and what economists do that is extraordinarily useful is that they offer frameworks for analyzing things. But do they actually offer platforms for business model innovation? No. a good background in macroeconomics or in behavioral finance can give an innovative manager or entrepreneur a very useful lens through which to view decision-making and behavior along an innovation axis, but in terms of actually suggesting methodologies that make one kind of success more likely than another kind of success, business school has not shown itself to be a wellspring of great ideas.
UBIQUITY: Then what about drama school?
SCHRAGE: What an interesting question, and it's funny that you say that. There are three kinds of reading that I do a lot of. One is history of technology, because I'm fascinated by recurring patterns in invention, innovation and adoption and the surrounding economics. The second amount of reading I do is in economics -- particularly behavioral economics, or cognitive psychology as it collides with economics, and examines how people invest in the face of risk and uncertainty. And the third group of reading is where I find myself reading books about improvisational theater -- books by Peter Brook, the theater director, books about the great animators, such as Chuck Jones, who did all the wonderful Bugs Bunny cartoons. I'm fascinated by interviews with computer animators, like the Disney people trying to adapt to CGI [computer graphic imagery].
Michael Schrage es el codirector de MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative, y en esta larga entrevista proporciona una visión heterodoxa y muy bien fundamentada sobre la innovación empresarial. Sus argumentos giran en torno a dos líneas básicas: 1) la inversión en innovación no garantiza el éxito (como ya apuntó en un artículo en Financial Times que comentamos aquí), y 2) la gestión adaptativa del proceso de innovación mediante la experimentación continua (dentro y fuera de la empresa) y el uso de herramientas de simulación y prototipado rápido. Además proporciona un buen análisis, con excelentes ejemplos, de las razones culturales que impiden a muchas organizaciones ser realmente innovadoras.
Sobre escuelas de negocios, MBAs y gestión empresarial también es muy recomendable el libro de Henry Mintzberg Managers not MBAs. (que ya ha sido traducido al español).
