"“Any school can teach entrepreneurship...we live entrepreneurship!”

As a course director for Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, this piece in the New York Times caught my eye. It focuses on how the current generation of students are more into entrepreneurship and innovation than any who has come before since "they have grown up hearing more about Bill Gates than F.D.R." The numbers seem to back this claim up too. Today, "more than 5,000 entrepreneurship programs are offered on two- and four-year campuses — up from just 250 courses in 1985. Full-scale majors, minors or certificates in entrepreneurship have leaped from 104 in 1975 to more than 500 in 2006". The current recession is likely to accelerate this development. Look at what happen in Japan in the 1990's as this Foreign Policy article points out: "recession may have boosted Japan’s national cool, discrediting Japan’s rigid social hierarchy and empowering young entrepreneurs. It may also have loosened the grip a big-business career track had over so much of Japan’s workforce, who now face fewer social stigmas for experimenting with art, music, or any number of similar, risky endeavors." We may, in other words, live in a time that is bound to foster more entrepreneurs than ever before and the one area that I would be especially interested in studying the effects of this would be finance. Paul Saffo, of Silicon Valley's Institute for the Future, once said: "If you want to understand the future, study recent failures". Finanance will be reborn thanks to a myriad of entrepreneurs focused on making things better.