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Using a unique entrepreneurship-focused survey of Stanford alumni, Lee and Eesley investigated how the Stanford Center for Entrepreneurial Studies (CES) at the Business School and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) at the Engineering School affect entrepreneurial activity. They administered the survey to a well-defined population of comparable individuals from multiple industries, in total generating 27,783 responses. Respondents reported information on their entrepreneurial status, participation in angel investing and venture capital, and on the founding, duration, and success of start-up ventures. Respondents also indicated to what degree, if any, they had participated in the CES or STVP programs.

The survey results reveal that overall participation in the Stanford Business School CES had a negative to zero impact on entrepreneurship rates and participation in the Engineering School STVP had no impact on entrepreneurship rates. However, the data suggests that participation in the Business School initiative decreased startup failure and increased firm revenue in the long-term. “University entrepreneurship programs may not increase entrepreneurship rates,” Lee and Eesley conclude, “but help students better identify their potential as entrepreneurs and improve the quality of entrepreneurship.”

These findings provide important context to broader questions about entrepreneurship development and incubation, such as whether entrepreneurship is an intrinsic or acquired trait, and as such, whether firms should seek to develop entrepreneurial capabilities internally or acquire them from external sources. This question equally concerns universities and the strategies institutions of higher education employ to foster entrepreneurial talent.

Lee and Eesley note that it is important to take into account variation in entrepreneurship training programs in course content, emphasis, and other dimensions. Their research suggests that general entrepreneurship education that targets a broader spectrum of startups, rather than one that solely focuses on technology startups, may be more effective in reducing the uncertainty in entrepreneurial ability or improving startup performance.

These findings may generalize to other samples of selective-admission college-educated alumni, although there is certainly need for future work that explores the effects of entrepreneurship education in different institutional environments.

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Lee studies the impacts of AI and robotics across multiple industries, including manufacturing, retail banking, and nursing homes. A trend he sees across most sectors following the adoption of robotics or AI is a positive increase in productivity. This has impacts for both the short-term and long-term relationships between humans and their robot coworkers, or “co-bots.” While it is true that the introduction of automation and robots initially replaces a significant number of workers in sectors such as manufacturing, over time, that impact reverses and there are job gains in many cases.

“The impact of robots often evolves over time from replacing human workers to augmenting them,” Lee explains, “and productivity gains [can] create opportunities for existing and new occupations.” This happens in a variety of ways. In some cases, the use of robotics and automation in one area frees up time, labor, and resources to employ more people in other, higher-skilled areas. In another situation, increases in productivity brought on by automation allow for greater company growth than would not have been possible otherwise. This, in turn, spurs the need to expand the workforce.

Alternatively, supplementing the labor of a small workforce with robotics and AI can also spread limited resources much farther. Lee and Eggleston’s studies of the impacts of robots on nursing home care in Japan repeatedly show that the use of robots positively increases the quality of service that oftentimes-understaffed care facilities can provide to the elderly and infirm. This can range from monitoring the physical condition of patients and reliably delivering medications to providing mental and emotional support to elderly residents through the use of robotic humanoid companions. Such innovative use of tech fills critical gaps that a human-only workforce would struggle to meet in a staffing shortage like Japan faces.

Looking to the future, Lee shares this perspective: “When the automobile was invented, we suddenly had a new demand for drivers. Now we’ll have to see if [automation] creates demand for other new occupations.” It’s an area of innovation and research he, Dr. Eggleston, and other Stanford researchers will be closely watching with their human eyes in the years to come.

Read the original article by Stanford HAI here >>

In July 2020 the Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) published a Policy Insight, Providing Information to Students and Parents to Improve Learning Outcomes, that looks at the learning gains that can be achieved through overcoming information asymmetries. This briefing is especially useful given our current climate where many schools remain closed and learning has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic; it is a time when information dissemination and parental engagement is even more important than ever.

In this article, REAP’s five cited publications help shape the discourse around learning barriers children face globally. REAP studies that contributed to this Policy Insight include REAP’s work on anemia in school children and the analysis of drop-out rates in middle- and high-school students in rural China. However, like REAP’s approach, the Policy Insight highlights the need to address multiple barriers to improve learning outcomes across the world.

J-PAL Policy Insight Summary

Many children struggle to master basic skills despite a rise in school enrollment around the world. For instance, India’s 2018 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) found that only about half of all grade 5 students in rural India could read a grade 2 text [3]. Assessments showed similar results in many other countries [28]. Programs providing information—about parents’ roles in education, school quality, students’ academic levels, students’ health problems, financial aid, and wage returns to education—attempt to address this lack of learning by making relevant information more available to parents and students.

Results from 23 randomized evaluations from low-, middle-, and high-income countries show that overcoming a gap in knowledge about education often increases parental engagement, student effort, or both, leading to improved learning outcomes. Almost all of the programs in this insight led to an increase in parental involvement or student motivation, which led to small to medium increases in learning. However, disseminating information has not improved learning levels when key health, financial, or structural barriers persist that information alone cannot overcome or when the information is discouraging, rather than encouraging, to students.

Because information-based interventions are typically very low cost and have been effective in many contexts, policymakers interested in increasing learning outcomes should consider if there are gaps in parent or student knowledge that they can overcome. 

Read the full Policy Insight here.

In combating poverty, like any fight, it’s good to know the locations of your targets.

That’s why Stanford scholars Marshall Burke, David Lobell and Stefano Ermon have spent the past five years leading a team of researchers to home in on an efficient way to find and track impoverished zones across Africa.

The powerful tool they’ve developed combines free, publicly accessible satellite imagery with artificial intelligence to estimate the level of poverty across African villages and changes in their development over time. By analyzing past and current data, the measurement tool could provide helpful information to organizations, government agencies and businesses that deliver services and necessities to the poor.

Details of their undertaking were unveiled in the May 22 issue of Nature Communications.

“Our big motivation is to better develop tools and technologies that allow us to make progress on really important economic issues. And progress is constrained by a lack of ability to measure outcomes,” said Burke, a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and an assistant professor of earth system science in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “Here’s a tool that we think can help.”

Lobell, a senior fellow at SIEPR and a professor of Earth system science at Stanford Earth, says looking back is critical to identifying trends and factors to help people escape from poverty.

“Amazingly, there hasn’t really been any good way to understand how poverty is changing at a local level in Africa,” said Lobell, who is also the director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment and the William Wrigley Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Censuses aren’t frequent enough, and door-to-door surveys rarely return to the same people. If satellites can help us reconstruct a history of poverty, it could open up a lot of room to better understand and alleviate poverty on the continent.”

The measurement tool uses satellite imagery both from the nighttime and daytime. At night, lights are an indicator of development, and during the day, images of human infrastructure such as roads, agriculture, roofing materials, housing structures and waterways, provide characteristics correlated with development.

Then the tool applies the technology of deep learning – computing algorithms that constantly train themselves to detect patterns – to create a model that analyzes the imagery data and forms an index for asset wealth, an economic component commonly used by surveyors to measure household wealth in developing nations.

The researchers tested the measuring tool’s accuracy for about 20,000 African villages that had existing asset wealth data from surveys, dating back to 2009. They found that it performed well in gauging the poverty levels of villages over different periods of time, according to their study.

Here, Burke – who is also a center fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies – discusses the making of the tool and its potential to help improve the well-being of the world’s poor.

Why are you excited about this new technological resource?

For the first time, this tool demonstrates that we can measure economic progress and understand poverty interventions at both a local level and a broad scale. It works across Africa, across a lot of different years. It works pretty darn well, and it works in a lot of very different types of countries.

Can you give examples of how this new tool would be used?

If we want to understand the effectiveness of an anti-poverty program, or if an NGO wants to target a specific product to specific types of individuals, or if a business wants to understand where a market’s growing – all of those require data on economic outcomes. In many parts of the world, we just don’t have those data. Now we’re using data from across sub-Saharan Africa and training these models to take in all the data to measure for specific outcomes.

How does this new study build upon your previous work?

Our initial poverty-mapping work, published in 2016, was on five countries using one year of data. It relied on costly, high-resolution imagery at a much smaller, pilot scale. Now this work covers about two dozen countries – about half of the countries in Africa – using many more years of high-dimensional data. This provided underlying training datasets to develop the measurement models and allowed us to validate whether the models are making good poverty estimates.

We’re confident we can apply this technology and this approach to get reliable estimates for all the countries in Africa.

A key difference compared to the earlier work is now we’re using completely publicly available satellite imagery that goes back in time – and it’s free, which I think democratizes this technology. And we’re doing it at a comprehensive, massive spatial scale.

How do you use satellite imagery to get poverty estimates?

We’re building on rapid developments in the field of computer science – of deep learning – that have happened in the last five years and that have really transformed how we extract information from images. We’re not telling the machine what to look for in images; instead, we’re just telling it, “Here’s a rich place. Here is a poor place. Figure it out.”

The computer is clearly picking out urban areas, agricultural areas, roads, waterways – features in the landscape that you might think would have some predictive power in being able to separate rich areas from poor areas. The computer says, ‘I found this pattern’ and we can then assign semantic meaning to it.

These broader characteristics, examined at the village level, turn out to be highly related to the average wealth of the households in that region.

What’s next?

Now that we have these data, we want to use them to try to learn something about economic development. This tool enables us to address questions we were unable to ask a year ago because now we have local-level measurements of key economic outcomes at broad, spatial scale and over time.

We can evaluate why some places are doing better than other places. We can ask: What do patterns of growth in livelihoods look like? Is most of the variation between countries or within countries? If there’s variation within a country, that already tells us something important about the determinants of growth. It’s probably something going on locally.

I’m an economist, so those are the sorts of questions that get me excited. The technological development is not an end in itself. It’s an enabler for the social science that we want to do.

Media Contacts

Adam Gorlick, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research: (650) 724-0614, agorlick@stanford.edu

Last fall, SPICE provided me an opportunity to design and organize its first post-collegiate online course. The Stanford-Hiroshima Collaborative Program on Entrepreneurship (SHCPE’s Japanese-friendly pronunciation, “shu-ppe”) was conducted in collaboration with the Hiroshima Business and Management School (HBMS) at the Prefectural University of Hiroshima (PUH). HBMS offers the only Master of Business Administration (MBA) program in Japan’s western region of Chugoku and Shikoku. Interacting with amazing individuals on both sides of the Pacific, this unique experience brought me priceless moments.

Innovation in Itself

SHCPE, a course to help nurture entrepreneurial thinking, was an innovation in itself. The program was born out of Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki’s vision to design and implement a social challenge to help accelerate Hiroshima’s regional growth. Harnessing the resources of Stanford and Silicon Valley, the new online class was launched to empower the students and to revitalize the business sector in Hiroshima. SPICE created the curricular content and HBMS provided the learning environment designed to maximize the academic experience for the students. As the course’s curriculum designer, I leveraged the expertise of my fellow SPICE online instructors and applied design thinking, a method developed by Stanford faculty, practiced widely in Silicon Valley, and popularized globally to understand the end-user, challenge our assumptions, and reconstruct alternative perspectives to generate innovative ideas.

Bridging Silicon Valley and Hiroshima

SHCPE’s 18 MBA students in Hiroshima met every Saturday morning for three hours from September 28 to November 16, 2019 to connect online with Japanese entrepreneurs, professionals, and scholars in Silicon Valley. The first virtual class focused on discussing the mindset expected for the course as well as the conceptual framework. In the following six weeks, we welcomed guest speakers who shared their diverse experiences. What were their prior experiences, expertise, and insights? What resources did they have to achieve their goals? What were the major promoters and impediments to their journeys? Through active exploration of these questions, the students were exposed to real-life case studies to analyze Silicon Valley’s ecosystem and think critically about entrepreneurial competence and qualification. The course was conducted entirely in Japanese.

The guest speakers engaged and energized the HBMS students. Akira Onozato spoke about the evolution of Silicon Valley over the past three decades. His diverse experiences as a serial entrepreneur painted a rich picture of the San Francisco Bay Area’s growth cycle. Akira’s story provided a great segue to Rika Nakazawa’s lecture on the mindset and culture surrounding startups. Rika highlighted grit, tolerance of failure, and branding as important assets of successful entrepreneurs. Dr. Fumiaki Ikeno spoke on the landscape and trends in the medical device industry. He pointed to Japan’s declining productivity and economic competitiveness and discussed the persistent fear of failure as a major impediment to promoting entrepreneurship. As an active venture capitalist on both sides of Pacific, Seiji Miyasaka explained the funding schemes and financial cycles surrounding the investment climate of startups. Using case studies, he highlighted the role of investors who act as coaches to aspiring entrepreneurs. Tatsuki Tomita’s definition of a startup was shaped by his own experiences of starting multiple companies. His discussion of the pivot pyramid provided a visual guideline for how startups can experiment with ideas and find their product-market fit. Tasha Yorozu shared her expertise as a legal counsel, walking through the steps of starting a business in Silicon Valley. Along with Jumpei Ishii, a visiting legal counsel from Japan, Tasha further discussed their observations of successful startup practices and common pitfalls. The diversity of SHCPE guests represented the vibrant Silicon Valley community. 

Active Learning and Knowledge Construction

While these professionals provided informative accounts of their expertise, SHCPE’s ultimate goal was to help each HBMS student to develop a mindset of an active learner. The MBA students were constantly challenged to think critically about the weekly theme, and work in pairs or teams to discuss assigned topics. The experience offered a dynamic and interactive learning environment for the Japanese students in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who had been accustomed to traditional lecture-style formats. SHCPE’s curriculum based on design thinking adopted an inquiry-based learning pedagogy, which engaged every student through weekly assignments and in-class discussions. During the first class, the students were informed that SHCPE would not teach them entrepreneurship. Instead, this course would provide them with the opportunity to reconstruct their knowledge of entrepreneurship and innovation based on what they observe, hear, and feel during the class. In addition, the students were required to provide feedback after each class, which was utilized to redesign the lesson plans for the following week.

This active and experiential mindset was envisioned by Dr. Gary Mukai, Director of SPICE and a renowned Japan–U.S. educator. “At SPICE, we provide students an opportunity to own their learning experience. Education is about empowering the students,” Dr. Mukai asserts. This tradition comes from the American philosopher and education reformist John Dewey, who said, “I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.” SHCPE’s inaugural curriculum aimed to implement this philosophy through direct, real-life interaction with founders and movers in Silicon Valley, and through the iterative process to deconstruct and reconstruct their knowledge on entrepreneurship.

Innovation Through Education

What SHCPE aimed to achieve was innovation through education. The weekly three-hour online class was roughly divided into three parts: guest lecture, class discussion, and interview. Prior to the interview session, a pre-assigned team of three students met with me in a separate online room and brainstormed their interview questions. For the majority of the students, it was their very first time to formally interview a person, and the experience brought a novel learning opportunity to think critically about entrepreneurial competence. Many commented on the challenge and the excitement of getting to know strangers by engaging them in a thoughtful conversation. The weekly interview highlighted the philosophy, aspiration, and raw sentiments of the guest speakers, evoking passion, energy, and empathy among the students.

SHCPE 2019 team with Ken-ichi Nakamura, President of the Prefectural University of Hiroshima

SHCPE strived to adopt the pedagogy of active learning and the toolsets of design thinking to implement Governor Yuzaki’s vision of “learning innovation.” The course appears to have succeeded in helping to realize his vision as one student reflected upon his experience:

This class does not intend to offer answers [to the question what entrepreneurship is]. Instead, it urges the students to constantly think on their own and engage themselves in learning. This is very different from the Japanese traditional pedagogy, which relies on rote memorization and mechanical process of practice problems. This class highlighted the fundamental difference in the philosophy of how we look at education, and I enjoyed this eye-opening experience.

SHCPE ’19 concluded with much enthusiasm. SPICE looks forward to continuing its partnership with HBMS to build upon the invaluable lessons learned from the inaugural program. With Stanford e-Hiroshima, an online course for high school students managed and taught by my colleague Rylan Sekiguchi, SPICE will continue its efforts to empower the people in Hiroshima.

Acknowledgement

I am greatly indebted to Dr. Gary Mukai for providing me this invaluable opportunity. Special thanks go to Carey Moncaster, Dr. HyoJung Jang, Jonas Edman, Meiko Kotani, Naomi Funahashi, Rylan Sekiguchi, Sabrina Ishimaru, Dr. Tanya Lee, and Waka Takahashi Brown for their valuable comments on the preliminary curriculum. I thank all of my colleagues at SPICE for their support and encouragement throughout the process.

My special gratitude goes to Akira Onozato, Dr. Fumiaki Ikeno, Jumpei Ishii, Rika Nakazawa, Seiji Miyasaka, Tatsuki Tomita, and Tasha Yorozu who took the time out of their busy Friday evening to participate in the virtual classroom. Their contagious enthusiasm energized the students.

Last but not least, I would like to express my deep appreciation to my collaborators at HBMS. I thank Professor Katsue Edo for his hard work and commitment to implement the program, Professor Yasuo Tsuchimoto for his technical expertise and dedication to administer the distance-learning, Professor Narumi Yoshikawa for supporting in-class discussions, and Kazue Hiura, Yoshihiko Oishi, and Kenji Okano for their capable assistance and thoughtful arrangements. Last but not least, my heartfelt congratulation goes to the 18 MBA students who successfully completed SHCPE ’19. The inaugural class will always have a special place in my heart.

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Related article:

• Stanford Alumni Weekend (October 24–27, 2019) Feature: Hiroshima Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki & SPICE’s Dr. Mariko Yoshihara Yang and a New Online Course for MBA Students in Japan