The innovator within

On Friday, Feb. 19, two classmates and I drove to Google’s office in Washington, D.C., to attend a conference about education run by TED and the Ashoka Foundation. I namedrop only to highlight that we were in an extremely entrepreneurial environment. TED runs conferences where innovators like Majora Carter and Bill Gates speak about creative and unconventional “ideas worth spreading,” in the words of TED’s slogan. The Ashoka Foundation grants fellowships to social entrepreneurs around the world.

Over the course of the day, we heard compelling stories about innovation in education. Aleta Margolis, executive director of the Center for Inspired Teaching, shared how she had founded a school where imagination was a stated, measured, academic goal. Kiran Bir Sethi, founder of India’s Riverside School, explained how she unleashed creativity in children of all socioeconomic backgrounds by making cities more child-friendly through regular street festivals. My biggest takeaway was a statistic presented by Earl Phalen, CEO of Summer Advantage USA, a nonprofit summer enrichment program for elementary and middle school students. Phalen announced that 150 new nonprofit organizations are founded in the United States every day.

One-hundred-fifty nonprofits is a lot of nonprofits. Multiply that number by 365, and you find that 54,750 nonprofits are founded every year in a country that already has 1.5 million such organizations. All of these institutions compete for a limited pool of foundation grants, government funds and private donations. More than 90 percent have revenue streams of less than $1 million and are struggling to stay afloat.

Our abundance of nonprofit institutions begs a question: Do we really need all of them? Do we really need several thousand institutions to advocate for animal rights, track government spending and send supplies to Haiti? Wouldn’t we achieve more if the leaders of half of these institutions had decided to serve (to borrow a term from the Ashoka Foundation) as “intrapreneurs” — forward-thinkers affecting change from within an existing institution?

I believe that we would. If we were to have more intrapraneurs and, by extension, fewer nonprofit organizations, we would spend less resources on operational costs and be able to focus more on making change. Unfortunately, our society does not have enough intrapreneurs because we place too much value on the lone frontiersman — or dare I say it in the age of Palin — the maverick.

Think back to when we applied to college. I remember being told that one of the best ways to impress an admission committee was to start a club. The crowning jewel of my Princeton application was not the leadership that I had demonstrated as drum major of my decades-old marching band, but the speech and debate team that I had founded (yes, I led both the marching band and debate team in high school and, miraculously, was never beat up — though I did accrue some good stories at band camp).

The conference that I attended provides further evidence of our emphasis on entrepreneurship. My fellow attendees and I sat in Google’s office, the queen bee of successful tech start-ups, and listened to speaker after speaker explain how they had engendered innovation by starting their own organizations. Then, we returned to campus later that day, just in time for TigerLaunch 2010, the Entrepreneurship Club’s annual business plan competition.

In saying all of this, I do not mean to imply that entrepreneurship is bad. It has yielded countless fantastic innovations. I cringe when I think about what it must have been like for my parents to go through four years of college without Google. However, I believe that it is time for us to give more of the limelight to the intrapreneur. Innovating from within is challenging and requires a different skill set from starting an organization from scratch. Our society would benefit if we were to discuss what it takes to be an intrapreneur as frequently and explicitly as we discuss what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

This change could start right here in Princeton. The Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education already offers entrepreneurship courses and hosts two scholars who specialize in the subject every year. It would be beneficial if it were to also offer a course in intrapreneurship, where students could learn how to negotiate complex organizational cultures and structures.

The administration does not need to be the only engine for change. We have hundreds of student organizations, many of which struggle to get anything done because they do not have enough members. The average effectiveness of our organizations would increase dramatically if more students were to think critically about how they could help existing organizations improve instead of starting their own clubs. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, every tiger wants to lead his own pack, but not all of us should.

Haley White is a sophomore from Chatham, N.J. She can be reached at hewhite@princeton.edu.