Entrepreneurship, entre nous

Let’s take a peek at my university campus’s innovation hub, and the professors who steal.

This month’s advertising campaign launched by car-maker Jaguar Land Rover is among the most socially inept of modern times. Nonetheless, the 30-second advert still succeeds in exhorting us to ‘copy nothing,’ something that is a longstanding principle of innovation and entrepreneurship.

‘Copy nothing’ was inspired by Jaguar’s founder, Sir William Lyons, who remarked that one of his cars, rather reassuringly, should be “a copy of nothing.” The cars were built in the city of Coventry, which happens to be where I am from; and Lyons was long revered as an entrepreneurial icon by my maternal grandfather, a meticulous gentleman who worked in quality control for the Standard Motor Company, which once upon a time was a great British car brand.

But what is entrepreneurship? And where does the term comes from? Let’s embark on a brief history and go on to reveal how universities are attempting to profit from teaching it, and are even sometimes breaking its cardinal rules.

Let’s face it, entrepreneurship is a queer subject for study at a university. By queer, I am not, of course, invoking the common meaning of that adjective in Twenty-First Century discourse—which has morphed so many times now that I confess, I’ve lost track. Once a slur for homosexual, now it is an epithet describing heterosexuals with gender non-conforming interests and behaviours. Rather, I am using the word in the literary sense meaning peculiar, strange, eccentric, off the beaten track.

The word’s origin lies in the Middle Ages, a gerund—that’s a verb moonlighting as a noun—developed from the French portmanteau verb entreprendre, literally “to take between” and coming to mean “to undertake.” It describes the act of someone engaging, presumably with enthusiasm, in a job of work. The terms ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ were later popularised by French economist Jean-Baptiste Say in his masterwork, A Treatise on Political Economy (1803).

Johannes Gutenberg printing the first sheet of the Bible. Unknown artist, Barcelona (1877). Image courtesy of Meisterdrucke.

But in the annals of our universities’ collective histories, the discipline of economics, let alone entrepreneurship, was a late addition. At the world’s current number one university, the University of Oxford, where I was lucky enough to study for my own degrees, the subject of PPE (philosophy politics and economics) emerged in 1920; and the MBA (master of business administration) was first granted at the Saïd School in 1996. By means of comparison, divinity has been taught at Oxford since the Eleventh Century.

Hence, economics and business are adolescent subjects; and entrepreneurship is usually taught as a topic under the broader umbrella of business administration, which is itself classed as a social science.

Perhaps that’s no real surprise, since entrepreneurial activity revolves around individuals’ capacity for risk, and is governed in large part by personality traits and behaviours as much as it is by any kind of structured, rational thought. It is not the easiest subject to categorise nor to disassemble into discrete components, so as to permit its dissemination by means of conventional (or any) pedagogy.

What does it mean to start a new business? How does one capture lightning in a bottle? And can it be done at scale, and to order? Absolutely not.

To no one’s surprise, the qualities that make for a successful business idea—the ‘secret sauce’—are not amenable to straightforward copy-paste reproduction. But there are some rules for engagement that can clearly be delineated, and hence taught.

For instance, the overall success of a new enterprise can be accurately charted by monitoring monetary gains. There are, of course, a variety of other metrics, but cash in the bank is undeniably the most robust. Cash is king. It is liquid capital. Other assets will undeniably accrue value, but until they are converted to cash, we are usually left guessing what they might be worth. Summon the accountants!

And then there are intellectual property rights, or simply IP for short. Ever since lacemakers from the Spanish Netherlands were lured to Tudor England, IP rights emerged as an innovative extension of property rights and fell under the English system of Common Law. Similarly, with the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in Mainz, copyright has also enjoyed a long tradition, and the first legal statute enshrining the concept of the right to a monopoly on one’s own written work was passed in England during the reign of Queen Anne (1710). Many of these ideas have propagated across the globe and down the centuries, solidified, in the case of patents, by the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT)—which encompasses 157 nation states and administered by WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organisation—and, in the case of copyright, the Berne Convention of 1886 (although the US only joined that convention slightly more than a century later).

Monopolies granted by IP are utterly essential to entrepreneurship, because the necessary risks and upfront investments of time and capital need to be offset by future returns, returns that ought reasonably to be protected from the threat posed by established competitors who could opportunistically exploit the inventions and creative materials of inventors and authors.

Intellectual property theft is very real and very deleterious, and you don’t need to look very far to spot those nations that have drawn disproportionate attention to themselves for their activities in this space. Patents and copyright protection, and their enforcement are crucial. Anyone who has been an entrepreneur instinctively knows this. It is baked into our collective philosophy of doing business.

And yet… and yet…

When you survey today’s university landscape and look more closely at the propensity of higher education to make a fast buck off the concept of teaching entrepreneurship, you uncover some interesting features.

Take for instance the entrepreneurial ‘hub’ at my own campus, which they call, rather curiously, ICUBE. No, this is not an acronym in the conventional sense, so there’s a linguistic innovation right there. Rather, the name refers to the multiplication of three ‘I’s—inspiration, ideation, and innovation—something that makes no sense at least mathematically, since the process of cubing a number involves multiplying that same number by itself, and is not the product of three different things.

On their website, ICUBE declares that “We are the home of Social Entrepreneurship” which will likely leave many visitors wondering what on earth social entrepreneurship actually is.

Let me explain. This more recent concept is generally understood to equate to the use of entrepreneurial principles for creating start-up businesses with the stated goal of affecting social change. However, this is a perilously slippery slope; and it has quickly come to mean supporting any idea that involves social engineering, namely the practice of intervening in the free market to impose rules and regulations such that equity can be accelerated and achieved for equity-deserving groups.

Who, I hear you ask, are equity-deserving groups? Well, it is quite simple: those considered to be underprivileged by virtue of their belonging to a particular disenfranchised group, such as racial minorities, same-sex attracted individuals, or Indigenous First Nations people.

A closer inspection of the website reveals that “ICUBE’s dedication … includes a commitment to ensuring every cohort accurately reflects the UTM community.”

So, quotas, then.

In my own humble opinion, I would question this entrepreneurial strategy as a truly effective method for singling out the best and brightest in the market for ideas. But I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise.

It’s all a bit ridiculous, if you stop to think about it. In the first instance, self-indulgent pearl-clutching over representation, and the imposing of strict oversight on such matters is a type of regulation, something that rarely prompts businesses to thrive. In the highly demanding biotechnology sector, I can attest that we already carry a huge and very necessary regulatory burden in our efforts to bring new drugs to market, a burden that is second only to the aviation industry. The last thing we need is yet more red tape.

Second, from a purely rational perspective, the mere claim that there are ‘equity-deserving groups’ invokes a mental Venn diagram that, by necessity, encompasses a subset of people who we must now label ‘equity-undeserving.’ Who are these unlucky people, then?

It’s obvious. White Anglo-Saxons like me.

But even the most cursory and superficial review of my own storied ethnic history quickly uncovers that I can legitimately claim disenfranchisement, financial and otherwise, at the hands of invading Vikings, and roughly four centuries’ worth (on-and-off) of Danish oppression. Apparently, that debt has been discharged. But who adjudicated that? Similarly, the long-guilty Italian descendants of those empire-crazed Romans should watch out. We Britons want our reparations for the Invasion, and we want them now!

Today, the diversity-minded acolytes who run ICUBE would doubtless encourage you to believe that prioritising marginalised groups such as the 2SLGBTQIA+ industrial social justice complex, as well as Indigenous Canadians, is an effective political sinecure for self-aware white middle-class people capable of expiating their guilt and shame for being descended from Western colonialists. In my opinion—and I’m stressing that a good deal more these days—this is pure derangement.

Entrepreneur, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Image courtesy of Scientific American.

For example, if we agree to militate against the British for their role in the Transatlantic slave trade, then why are we not censuring the Arabs for their numerous slave routes across the Sahara, along the Barbery Coast and from Zanzibar? Oddly enough, much of that slavery was eradicated in the early Twentieth Century under pressure from the French and the British. The irony is palpable.

And if we look elsewhere in the market for victimhood and oppression, we find that 16% of Canadians in Gen Z are self-identifying into the 2SLGBTQIA+ category—nearly twice the rate among Millennials, and quadruple the proportion found in my own generation (Gen X). Not wishing to be cynical, but this recent ballooning is not borne out by internet search query data on pornographic content and is therefore less to do with sexual preference and a lot more to do with improving socioeconomic prospects. Nevermind; wave them all through, I say, and grant them concessions and special benefits.

To my mind, this is all remarkably ill-conceived, and I have no doubt that the exploits of ICUBE—or any other outfit like it—are unlikely to coalesce into the turbo-charged engine of innovation and success that its advocates are so desperately hoping for.

Over the past year, investors have been backing away from the ESG mandates that were so enthusiastically endorsed in recent times, despite ideologically captured entities like the World Economic Forum predictably arguing for a doubling-down on ESG commitments and action. And there’s much more. The carbon tax in Canada imposed by the prevailing Trudeau administration is a recipe for economic disaster. Canada, which owns a vast swathe of the world’s valuable resources has elected under the present government to chart a path to the immiseration and impoverishment of the majority of Canadians. Based on current voting trends, very fortunately, they will shortly be replaced and the adults will take charge next October.

I should get to the point. But before I do, allow me to briefly digress. From my window, I see dark clouds knitting together along the campus horizon. A sense that a comeuppance is in the offing, one that is liable to be writ large in the fiery language of workplace safetyism. Victims are howling, activists are mustering, and the dark servants of social justice roam hither and thither in the lands. If you listen closely, you’ll hear in the distance the gathering mob cheering, and the faint rasp of pitch-fork tines being sharpened. “Go get ’im, lads!” To be completely frank, I’m beginning to understand how Nobel Laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn must have felt as the first copies of his pivotal work The Gulag Archipelago were coming off the Paris presses at the tail-end of 1973. But, unlike me, he was a genius. “You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.”

In this inclement political climate, I must refrain from naming any names. Resorting to direct criticism is a sign of ideological dissension, it is to stray from the Party line; and we can’t be having that; certainly not within the hallowed confines of a lofty university. Then, let me phrase my remarks assiduously. You would think, would you not, that if for some strange reason I chose to apply for a leadership role at an entrepreneurial hub, one like ICUBE, for instance—and, trust me, that’s a vanishingly microscopic prospect—then among the cardinal qualifications for the job would be a deep and reverent respect for intellectual property rights. After all, it is a foundation stone of entrepreneurship. I would not doubt—not for a moment—that the successful candidate would unquestionably embrace such a mindset.

And yet, very compelling evidence has arrived just lately in my email inbox that would paint a very different picture. In fact, I discovered that one of my Substack articles has been shared from behind the pay wall without my express consent, which would amount to copyright infringement. The problem, then, is what to do about it. Shrug and do nothing? Or pursue the perpetrator—someone who, as it happens, is among the leadership team at ICUBE—through the small claims court? What do you think? Why not let me know in the comments section.

The 1965 unauthorised Ace Books edition of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Image courtesy of Reddit.

If the people behind an entrepreneurial outfit—such as ICUBE, which is a satellite unit of the University of Toronto, one that purports to champion and mentor young aspirational business owners—if such an enterprise can’t even abide by the rules of the game, rules that I have taken great pains here to spell out, then I would argue that such misdemeanours are worthy of attracting broader attention. And it may well be that they are worthy of proportionate correction by whatever means the attorneys deem appropriate. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but, on balance, a necessary one.