PART I: Framing

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CHAPTER 1. Introduction

Raffaella Borasi & David E. Miller

1.1. E-book’s motivation and goals

What do educational innovations look like, and what can they accomplish?  What does it take to successfully undertake worthwhile educational innovations? How can educators learn to be more effective when engaging in innovations, so as to make a difference in addressing today’s education problems?  This e-book addresses these questions using entrepreneurship as a lens to examine how a few educators, in a variety of positions and roles, have promoted and carried out innovations that added value to their organizations and the clients they served, and by doing so contributed solutions to specific challenges in education.

As educators committed to improving education (broadly defined as supporting development and learning across the lifespan and in a variety of settings), we recognize that the educational problems we are facing today are very complex and thus overcoming them will require radical changes in how education is delivered as well as comprehensive social reforms.  At the same time, we take a pragmatic stance, wanting to take action now, so as to make a difference for at least some of the individuals and communities we serve.  As such, we have been heartened and inspired by colleagues who have successfully promoted and carried out value-adding educational innovations, whether these innovations involved teaching innovative units or promoting school-wide curriculum reforms, adding new services, or making organizational change in an educational institution.  And we believe that the field of education can benefit greatly if more educators develop the knowledge and skills, as well as the drive and confidence, to engage “entrepreneurially” in similar innovations.

While recognizing the powerful role of innovations in education, we are also aware that initiating change is never easy, and it may be especially challenging in traditional educational contexts that are resistant to change.  Furthermore, few educators have been explicitly trained to assume this daunting role, so even those among us who want to promote innovations may be at a loss as to how to go about it.  These considerations made us look for concepts and tools that can empower educators to become more effective at promoting innovations.

As we have and continue to pursue this goal, we have found valuable inspiration and concrete resources in an unexpected place: the field of entrepreneurship.  In 2004 our university sought and was awarded a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to promote “entrepreneurship education” across all programs offered on our campus.  In the school of education we were at first somewhat skeptical about the possible contributions of entrepreneurship for our field, but we soon learned that entrepreneurship encompasses much more than just starting new businesses.  As we expanded our view of entrepreneurship, we began to recognize many interesting parallels between the practices of entrepreneurs and those of education change-agents.  For example, educators who have made a difference for their institutions and their clients do not just have good ideas for innovations, they also are skilled at evaluating and seizing opportunities, developing and implementing well-thought-out plans, building coalitions, securing resources, evaluating and managing risk, and creating a culture that encourages creativity and initiative, all of which are some of the very same skills that characterize successful entrepreneurs in other fields.  At the same time, it is also important to realize that entrepreneurial educators (which we define as “educators who consistently engage in innovations that add value to their organizations and the clients served”) may differ significantly from business entrepreneurs in many respects. Most notably, the “value” that entrepreneurial educators seek to generate is measured mostly in terms of contributions to their educational mission and the solution of social problems, rather than the economic gains as measured in traditional business-focused entrepreneurial pursuits.

This, in turn, made us wonder whether and how specific concepts and findings from the field of entrepreneurship could help us identify new tools and skills that education change agents would benefit from learning.  As we looked at the literature available at the time, we could not find a satisfactory answer to our questions and thus decided to conduct our own empirical study of educators who had been successful at promoting innovations, while using entrepreneurship as a lens.  For subjects, we chose eight educators in our community, each of whom will be briefly introduced in the next section and whom we had known and admired for their ability to promote and carry out innovations that truly made a difference for their organizations and clients.  We purposely selected these individuals to represent quite different roles as well as a variety of settings where learning and development takes place.  We made this choice in part because of our broad conception of education, but also because we hoped that looking at what non-traditional educators (such as CEOs of non-profits and for-profit organizations) have done could help school leaders and teachers – who all-to-frequently operate in more traditional and often more constraining contexts within their institutions – envision new possibilities and begin to “think outside the box”. As described in detail in Appendix A, our study involved multiple in-depth interviews with each subject and some of their close collaborators, as well as the collection and analysis of relevant artifacts. The immediate objective was to identify how these entrepreneurial educators went about the process of initiating specific innovations in their educational settings, with an ultimate goal to provide shared insights & experiences with other educators.

The stories of these eight outstanding, yet “ordinary” educators, are at the core of this e-book.  We hope readers will find them as inspirational as we did, first of all because their stories document the great value that educational innovations can generate.  Even more importantly, these stories also show that by promoting value-adding innovations, it is possible to make a difference in education – even for educators in traditional positions such as teacher, principal, assistant superintendent for instruction, or university leader.  The very fact that we chose our case study subjects among people we know and work with, within our mid-size city and its surrounding region, is, by itself, a demonstration that these people are by no mean as rare as one may at first think. Indeed, we believe that once you start looking in “your own backyard”, you will be able to find similar examples and possibly contribute to this compendium additional valuable stories of educational innovations – in the spirit of an “open education” approach, as discussed in more detail in a later section of this chapter.

A key goal of this e-book and its companion OER materials is to provide concrete suggestions about what any educator can do to become more effective and successful at promoting innovations. Besides telling the stories of a group of inspirational entrepreneurial educators, this e-book provides informative insights about the practices they used effectively as they initiated innovations. A special focus of our analyses illuminates the following five areas, identified in the entrepreneurship literature as especially important to the process of promoting and carrying out innovations (discussed in more depth in Chapter 2):

• Vision – i.e., the role played by an entrepreneurial educator’s vision in their everyday activity and when making decisions about specific innovations, as well as how that vision is developed and communicated.
• Opportunities –how opportunities are uncovered/created and acted upon by entrepreneurial educators.
• Risk – how entrepreneurial educators approach risk, and what strategies and tools they use to evaluate and minimize the risks involved in specific innovations.
• Resources – how entrepreneurial educators approach resource issues and what strategies they employ to raise and effectively manage resources to accomplish specific innovations as well as their mission, more generally.
• Growth – the extent to which entrepreneurial educators aspire to “expand their sphere of influence” and the different forms this expansion can take, as well as the strategies used to deal with the inevitable changes and challenges that growth brings with it.

As documented in Chapters 3-10, the case studies of our eight entrepreneurial educators reveal some striking similarities between the practices they employed, on the one hand, and the practices identified in the literature as characteristic of entrepreneurs across fields, on the other hand.  For example, while our eight subjects often took risks that other educators may not have felt comfortable with, they never did so recklessly.  Rather, their assessment of the risk involved was different, as their risk-assessment practices addressed not only the consequences of failing, but also considered the risk of missing a valuable opportunity to make a difference for their clients or to move their organizations to the next level.  Furthermore, in considering the likelihood of the success or failure of a specific innovation they wanted to undertake, these educational entrepreneurs took into consideration their past experiences of success as well as their specialized knowledge of the field.  They were also more inclined to take on the inevitable risks of embarking on a new innovation because they were able to put into place systems that would allow them to monitor and stop the initiative if potential damage from the initiative began to appear. And they were also always very open to modifying their plans to respond to unexpected developments.

We believe that this e-book will be of interest to a wide audience within the field of education.  This audience will include education practitioners who are interested in becoming more effective at promoting value-adding innovations themselves, educators who prepare the next generation of education practitioners, and researchers who study the process of innovation and change in education more generally.

1.2. The eight featured entrepreneurial educators

To give readers a flavor of the case studies featured in the book and what each may contribute, in the following paragraphs we briefly introduce each of the eight entrepreneurial educators we studied.  We present these briefs about each of these individuals in the order in which their full case studies are be reported in the book.  We have purposefully chosen this sequence to start with individuals who best fit the traditional image of an entrepreneur, and then move to more “traditional” educators (i.e., administrators and teachers) operating within the contexts of higher education institutions and K-12 schools respectively.  By doing so, we hope to be able to use the first three case studies to concretely introduce the readers to many of the practices that prototypical entrepreneurs employ to start and grow an organization, so that they can use these practices as a reference point as they read about teachers and administrators implementing innovations in schools and colleges in the subsequent five case studies.  We believe there is great value for all educators, and educational leaders in particular, to read about innovations that took place in settings different from their own – and especially non-traditional educational settings like small businesses or non-profit organizations – as a way to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions and constraints, and thus recognize the possibility for very different ways of operating.

Donna Thompson – as co-owner of Fusion Production, Inc. As someone in charge of her own business within the field of education, Donna Thompson is the case study subject that comes closest to the typical image of an entrepreneur. A former high school history teacher, Donna decided after nine years of teaching to join a small firm that provided professional development services, mostly to corporations; a few years later, however, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, and she and a colleague decided to buy the company and “turn it around.”  Their vision was to refocus the company to support the organizing of effective meetings for both corporations and professional associations and as a vehicle to provide worthwhile learning experiences for working professionals. After several years of hard work and innovative practice, which also involved at some point a major rethinking of their work to adapt to disruptive technologies, the company became very successful, increasing their staff and annual revenues almost tenfold. While this was a clear success from a business viewpoint, Donna makes clear that her goals and vision for the company were not limited to generating economic value, but also included contributing high quality opportunities for adult learners by capitalizing on state-of-the-art technology and pedagogical techniques.

Roderick Jones – as CEO of the Community Place of Greater Rochester.  Our second case study features an example of a social entrepreneur, an individual who thrives at developing new not-for-profit organizations aimed at addressing social problems and grounded in the community.  Rod became CEO of the Community Place of Greater Rochester only a couple of years after this new organization was created from the merger of three separate Settlement Houses. As essentially the founding CEO of this new organization, Rod did much to develop its mission, culture, and structure, in addition to starting several important new partnerships and initiatives.  Prior to joining the Community Place, Rod had been a co-founder of the Rochester Step-Off Program, a small non-profit organization that used participation in stepping (a traditional form of African American dancing) as the vehicle to encourage and support under-privileged youth to go to college. To all of his enterprises, Rod has brought a strong education agenda. He believes in a community service model that aims at empowering individuals from underprivileged backgrounds to “help themselves” so as to eventually become self-sufficient, and he sees education as a key means to achieve this goal.

Gidget Hoft – as CEO of the Rochester Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired – Goodwill (ABVI).  ABVI benefited from Gidget Hoft’s dynamic leadership as CEO, for almost 34 years, until her retirement in 2020.  While ABVI, funded in 1915, was already a well-established organization when Gidget became its CEO in 1986, under her leadership it significantly expanded and somewhat transformed its mission and scope.  This was the result of the many new ventures Gidget initiated, including starting new manufacturing operations and thrift stores that could employ visually impaired individuals, as well as developing innovative training opportunities and services for this population. Because of her track-record of starting new ventures within her organization, Gidget can be considered a prototypical example of an “intrapreneur,” albeit in the non-profit sector.  Gidget’s initiatives have added considerable value to her organization and the individuals it serves, not only by providing employment and learning opportunities to a growing number of visually impaired people each year, but also by creating new revenue sources that have enabled ABVI to offer other services to its clients without having to depend on the uncertainties of government funding and donations.  A speech pathologist by training, Gidget has devoted her career to empowering individuals with disabilities to become more self-sufficient and productive members of society.  An integral part of this mission has been not only to create learning and development opportunities for her clients, but also to educate all stakeholders (her staff, partners, and society more generally) to recognize and value the potential of individuals with disabilities.  Therefore, like Rod, we consider Gidget first and foremost an educator.

Patricia Chiverton – as Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Rochester.  When Pat Chiverton took on the role of dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Rochester, a professional school within a highly decentralized private research university, the School of Nursing was in dire financial straits.  During her nine years in that role, Pat was able to totally “turn around” this situation through a series of innovations, which included among many others, starting new visionary programs while closing down traditional ones in which the school could not be as competitive, doing aggressive fundraising, and developing “business lines” within the school as a way to develop and test new models of health care as well as to generate new sources of revenue to support teaching and research. Her actions in all of these specific initiatives, as well as her overall approach to her leadership role, present many interesting parallels with those of traditional entrepreneurs like Donna Thompson (our first case study). Although it is clear that for Pat the financial welfare of her institution was never an end goal in and of itself, bringing the school out of dire straights and into financial well-being was a means to accomplish her vision of developing new and more effective models of health care for the ultimate benefit of society.  We can also see a strong similarity between Pat’s and Gidget Hoft’s motivation for and approach to the creation of new business lines within their institutions.  Pat’s case study is a great illustration of the remarkable value that entrepreneurial academic leaders (i.e., presidents, deans, department chairs, etc.) can generate for their institutions, especially when given the level of autonomy and responsibility provided in a decentralized private university like Pat’s.

Ron Dow – as Head of the Libraries at the University of Rochester.  This case study features Ron Dow as the Head of Libraries at the University of Rochester, who over his eight-year leadership was able to transform the campus libraries into inviting, vibrant, and functional places for faculty and students to work in.  This remarkable outcome was the result of undertaking many successful innovations – from a major renovation of the main library facilities, to a re-conception of the composition of the university library collection, and the role of university librarians.  All Ron’s innovations, big and small, have been informed by his vision of the library as playing an integral role in the instructional mission of a college, rather than providing a “service.” Throughout Ron’s tenure, he was very successful in finding creative ways to fund his initiatives so as to turn his vision into reality, even at times of great financial constraints. In fact, his case study shows how great synergy, rather than tension, can be achieved between fiscal responsibility and pursuing an ambitious educational mission. This case study also highlights the contributions that administrative leaders – not only academic/instructional leaders, can make to an educational institution when they assume a more entrepreneurial approach.

Mary Rapp – as Assistant Superintendent of Instruction at a suburban school district.  As a school leader in the same suburban district from 1987 to 2006, first in the role of Principal of one of its elementary schools and then as Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction, Mary Rapp took a leadership role in several reform initiatives aimed at improving the quality of instruction offered to students in her district.  Her curricular innovations spanned from developing the first reading curriculum for her school (as principal), to the development of consistent curricular frameworks and objectives for all subjects across grade levels (as assistant superintendent).  Mary also sought to improve instruction by increasing the quality of teaching, which involved developing an alternative process to evaluate teachers, which was approved by the union for her school when she was principal and eventually influenced district-wide changes in the teacher evaluation process, and engaging in systemic math reform.  During the course of these experiences, Mary employed some of the same practices as the entrepreneurial educators featured in the previous case studies, despite the many constraints presented by a public K-12 school setting.  Mary’s insightful analysis of her different experience in the roles of principal and assistant superintendent, respectively, also provides valuable insights about how the position held in the organization may significantly affect both the kinds of innovations an entrepreneurial educator may be able to successfully undertake, as well as the nature and extent of the impact that can be made on the organization.

Ralph Spezio – as principal of an urban elementary school.  Ralph Spezio is another great example of a transformational school leader, yet his case study presents some striking differences from the previous one.  During his 12-year tenure as principal of one of the poorest elementary schools in the Rochester City School District, Ralph transformed his school into a place that truly attended to its children’s needs through several innovative initiatives.  These initiatives, however, did not so much focus on curriculum and pedagogy, but rather addressed other issues that he thought were equally critical to his students’ academic success – including,  literally, the building of a pre-school on his school premises as a means to set up his students for success when they entered first grade, creating a health clinic within the school to address health needs of his students (and families), establishing a special collaboration with a local college to prepare the kinds of teachers he needed, and initiating a community-based movement for the prevention of lead poisoning.  Ralph’s story shows the power of “looking outside the box” for solutions to many of the problems affecting today’s schools, especially when combined with a vision of education as serving the needs of the “whole child” in urban settings.  His story also suggests that being entrepreneurial may support other school leaders committed to making a difference in urban education.

Lynn Gatto – as an urban elementary teacher.  One may question whether teachers, given their very limited control on their organization’s resources and decisions, can be entrepreneurial.  The case study of Lynn Gatto, who spent over 30 years as an elementary teacher in the Rochester City School District, one of the poorest urban districts in New York State, dispels any doubts one may have in this regard.  Throughout her long teaching career, Lynn has shown remarkable resourcefulness and determination in providing her urban students with the learning experiences she felt they needed to “level the playing-field” and be successful in both school and life.  This translated into many innovative initiatives that have spanned from creating (and even publishing) innovative curricula to organizing and funding field trips to other parts of the country to enable her students to broaden their experiences. Lynn has been recognized for her innovative efforts as well as her success in increasing her students’ learning with prestigious awards such as 2004 New York Teacher of the Year and 2006 Disney Teacher.  Throughout her career, Lynn has been able to bring her ideas to fruition. And, despite the challenges presented by limited funding and the bureaucracy of a large urban school district and by not being in a leadership position, she has demonstrated many of the entrepreneurial attitudes and practices identified in the previous case studies.  At the same time, it is important to recognize that Lynn’s position in the organization gave her little or no opportunity to affect her organization’s culture, resources, or “growth”, as other entrepreneurial educators featured in this book did.  She did, however, seek alternative opportunities to “increase her sphere of influence” (i.e., affect more than just the students in her classes), which involved publishing, presenting at conferences, and participating in the preparation of the next generation of teachers.

As you read the case study of any of these entrepreneurial educators, we encourage you to contribute your thoughts about the case as a commentary, following the appropriate  “Guidelines for Contributions”.  Upon review, all accepted commentaries will be linked to the last section of the relevant case study.

1.3. A growing collection of additional stories of educational innovations

While our case studies were conducted in the mid-2000s, the stories and the mindsets and practices of these eight entrepreneurs have stood the test of time and are still relevant today.  Because these case studies were the result of a systematic research study, it is important that they remain unchanged, even though the nature of an e-book allows us to provide updates on the stories of these educators in a specific section of each case study.

In the spirit of “open education,” though, we see great value in complementing these rigorous case studies with additional stories of educational innovations that can continue to be contributed overtime by a wider audience.  Appendix B of the e-book includes a collection of these stories, contributed in part by students in a graduate course we have been teaching at the Warner School of Education at the University of Rochester, entitled Entrepreneurial Skills for Educators, and in part by other users of this e-book.

We encourage everyone reading this e-book to consider contributing to this section, as a way not only to add valuable information to the benefit of other readers, but also to deepen your own understandings of what it takes to undertake successful innovations in education.  You may want to report on the story of an innovation you yourself initiated, or “interview” an entrepreneurial educator you know to learn more about how s/he went about a specific innovation you found especially valuable.

To ensure a consistent format and quality, if you are interested in contributing a story, we ask that you follow the directions included in the “Guidelines for Contributions” and submit your story for our review.  All accepted stories will be immediately accessible in the website associated with this e-book, with a smaller selection also being included in Appendix B of the e-book itself.

1.4. How the e-book is organized and suggestions for use

We conclude this introduction with a brief overview of the contents of this e-book, as well as some information about how it has been organized and can be used.

Chapter 2, as its title suggests, is intended to “set the stage” for the rest of the book, and we recommend you read it next.  Here we introduce key concepts and findings from the field of entrepreneurship that informed our study. We also share the conceptual categories that guided our writing of the stories and the analysis of each entrepreneurial educator’s practice. Each of these key elements will be used as organizers in subsequent chapters.  A section in this chapter also situates our work with respect to other applications of entrepreneurship to education.

Each of chapters 3 through 10 report the case study of one of the eight entrepreneurial educators we studied. These case study chapters are divided in two groups – those featuring educators operating in non-traditional settings, and those featuring educators in K-12 schools or universities.  Each case study chapter begins with an account of the individual’s professional “story” and the role played by innovation.  These stories also include detailed reconstructions of how a few representative innovations were developed, as a way to get a better sense of their nature and value, and even more importantly to shed light on how each educator went about each stage of the process of initiating innovations.  Each story is followed by an “analysis” of the subject’s entrepreneurial practice, systematically using the five categories identified earlier in this introduction and discussed in more detail in Chapter 2 (i.e., vision, opportunities, risk, resources, and growth). Each analysis also identifies and discusses other elements that may be more unique to the case.  Each chapter closes with a brief summary of key insights gained from the case study.

The closing chapters are different in both content and structure from chapters 3 through 10, in that they look across all the case studies reported in those chapters, summarizing selected findings from our rigorous cross-case analysis to draw implications for the field of education.  More specifically, Chapter 11 identifies and discusses specific practices used by our subjects with respect to vision, opportunities, risk, resources, and growth, respectively.  Chapter 12 identifies key factors that may have helped or hindered our subjects’ entrepreneurial behavior by looking at their individual characteristics (or “traits”), characteristics of their organization and other contextual factors, and the types of innovations they might engage in.  Chapter 13 examines the practices our subjects used at different stages of the process of initiating an innovation, while taking into consideration all the previously identified factors.  Chapter 14 concludes the e-book by highlighting the major takeaways of our study for educators interested in capitalizing on entrepreneurship to become more effective changes agents.

Readers interested in learning more about the research design used to derive the findings reported in the e-book can find detailed information about our research design in Appendix A.

A selection of the stories of educational innovations contributed by students and other users of the e-book have been included in Appendix B.  The complete set of additional stories, as well as the innovation stories included in the case study, can be accessed on the accompanying website.  Here tags have been used to facilitate their search and selection. For some of these innovation stories, an “annotated version” including an identification of practices used at specific stages of that innovation is also available.

The sequence of chapters within the e-book was the result of a purposeful choice on our part, intended to be optimal for readers interested in reading this e-book linearly – as any other traditional book.  If you intend to print a copy of the e-book, we recommend that you follow this sequence and print the content in its entirety.

At the same time, we recognize that one of the key values of an e-book is the flexibility it gives readers to choose different selections and sequencing of its contents, and therefore we have purposefully written the case studies so each can be read in isolation and/or in any order.   For example, we expect that some readers may prefer to read first about a subject in a position that is similar to their own, while others may prefer a different ordering.  We hope, however, that eventually you will be enticed to read all the eight case study chapters, as each provides unique insights and contributions about the practices that can make educators more effective at promoting innovations.  We also believe that all educators can learn valuable lessons by looking at the practices of colleagues in other professions – something that educators rarely have the opportunity to do.

We can also envision that some readers – or students in a course using this e-book – may prefer to first read only the “story” component of the case studies, so as to develop an analysis of their own before reading ours.   Reading just the stories will also be sufficient for readers who want then to jump directly to the results of our cross-case analysis, as reported in the final four chapters.

The additional stories included in the Appendix can be read at any time and in any order.

Additional ways to assign readings from the e-book in a course or professional development offering are also offered and discussed in the Learning Tasks section of the accompanying website.