Blog Assignment # 5

Our approach to innovation is dead wrong:

Diana Kander in her TED talk, “our approach to innovation is dead wrong” addresses how business schools fail to produce successful entrepreneurs. She linked this with her own personal experience that she faced when she was 17. The fear of being attacked led her to learn martial art and when that unpleasant fear became reality at the parking lot of the back of the restaurant where she worked. She was unable to fight against the attacker despite being the green belt and all the training that she took. The main purpose of telling this story was to highlight that many business schools don’t really prepare students for the real-world challenges when it comes to starting a venture in the same way her self-defense classes failed to equip her with the right training. She explained how flawed the training was as she was trained to fight against same size opponent in a controlled environment which is far from the reality. Similarly, business courses teach the same outdated steps of systematic thinking that are not feasible when it comes to real life. She emphasis how students are taught to focus on planning and structuring in a theoretical way that is more of time waste instead of experimenting and testing a product in a real market to know if this is actually going to work or not.