The central question of my ethnography is: What does it mean to prepare educationally to be a 21^st century knowledge worker in the 21^st century global knowledge economy? The hypothesis is that the aftermath of the Great Recession combined with the pace of technological change provides the socio-cultural context within which to investigate how educationally privileged students at a liberal arts college are using experiential learning in regards to innovation and entrepreneurship to equip themselves to be 21^st century knowledge workers.  The broader economic and social changes associated with the Great Recession provide the context within which to analyze how the educational elite are using experiential learning to handle the trends that were either began in the aftermath of or accelerated by the Great Recession.  Culture has meaning only in its social context; it has no significance by itself pronounced the preeminent British social anthropologist Edmund Leach.

Macro- and micro-level trends illuminate the circumstances that form the setting for the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at Yale that is being examined in my research.

Macro-level trends:

• Technology allows jobs to be done on-line and fractionally.
• Disassociation of the U.S. stock market from the operation of the economy.
• Unification of the global capital markets with the U.S. Federal Reserve as banker to the global economy.
• Romanization of entrepreneurs as cool and capitalist superheroes.
• Specialized media coverage of technology and entrepreneurship, e.g. Bloomberg West
• Modern capitalists are both mission- and profit-driven and think of building their businesses in terms of decades rather than quarters.
• The era of financialized capitalism is reshaping the political economy based on the capitalist economic premise of “shareholder value.”
• Convergence of academia and the global knowledge economy.
• Universities are at the intersection of knowledge creation, technological innovation and disruption, and the potential application of technology through entrepreneurship.

Micro-level trends:

• Modernization of the university’s approach to the production and use of knowledge.
• Student demand for experiential learning related to innovation and entrepreneurship.
• Alumni engagement in the university through entrepreneurship initiatives.
• University benchmarking against its peer group now includes programs in innovation and entrepreneurship.
• Completion of the build-out of substantial pieces of the infrastructure for entrepreneurship: a) expansion of Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (“YEI”) programs, and developing a sustainable track record of successful start-ups, b) opening Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design in 2012, collaboration with YEI, InnovateHealth Yale and the Yale School of Medicine, c) opening the new building for the School of Management in 2014, and potential expansion and modernization of its entrepreneurship curriculum.

The context for my research at Yale is encapsulated in an environment where the university is transitioning to a more pragmatic stance on the production and use of knowledge.  Yale is establishing the right conditions for creating a culture of commercialization of student-led innovation and entrepreneurship.  Students are poised to capitalize on this emerging culture.

What if there is a futurist committee at Yale and other universities that is mandated to continuously ask and answer the question, what’s next?