Don’t know about you, but I’m less interested in Facebook’s IPO than I am in the efforts of people trying to find the next Facebook out of Boston/Cambridge. One such effort is the new Experiment Fund, based at Harvard University, which I wrote about earlier this week.

Turns out there’s more to the latest seed-stage fund in Boston than initially meets the eye. I had a chance to speak with the Experiment Fund’s co-founders, Hugo Van Vuuren of Harvard and Patrick Chung, a partner at Silicon Valley-based New Enterprise Associates (not that Patrick Chung, that Patrick Chung).

They clarified the goals of the new fund and provided some more context around how it plans to distinguish itself from other similar efforts. I’ve also talked with a number of other early-stage investors around town and have gotten a better sense of how the Experiment Fund is being received locally (more on that below).

First, some mechanics of the fund, which has been in the works for about two years. Harvard has no financial stake and will have no say in the fund’s investment decisions, but it has provided support and office space, Van Vuuren says. He declined to specify the projected size of the fund, but he said it plans to make four to six new investments over the next two years, each in roughly the $100,000 to $250,000 range.

The Experiment Fund has already invested in four companies: Rock Health (see my colleague Wade’s stories here and here), Omada Health, Punch Media, and Tivli. Interestingly, only Tivli is based in the Boston area. Rock Health and Omada are in San Francisco, and Punch Media is in the DC area. They all were started by Harvard students—the key ingredient for now—but the fund intends to invest in teams from other schools around Boston and the East Coast, as well. So I’m guessing its next four investments will be pretty different from its first four, at least geographically.

“We want to meet them here,” Chung says. “We want to help you right here in Boston where the ideas were first born, where the team was put together.”

One issue they wanted to address was the notion that the fund is … Next Page »

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There’s a new player in the seed-stage investment game in Boston. As of this week, the Experiment Fund is open for business at Harvard University, backed by the Silicon Valley venture firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The startup investment fund is being hosted by Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in Cambridge, MA.

The new fund is led by Hugo Van Vuuren (see photo above), a Harvard graduate student and entrepreneur, and two venture capitalists from NEA, Patrick Chung and Harry Weller (both Harvard alums). David Edwards, a Harvard professor of biomedical engineering, serves as an advisor to the fund. Van Vuuren and NEA did not respond to requests for comment in time for this article.

The basic structure of the Experiment Fund is that selected startups—mostly student-led teams from Cambridge—will receive up to $250,000 in seed funding over the next two years, presumably in exchange for a sizable equity stake in the companies. The fund is based out of Harvard but says it will operate independently of the university and will look at teams from other local schools—and, more broadly, from the East Coast. The sectors targeted are pretty broad as well; they include information technology, healthcare, and energy.

No word yet on the size of the fund or how many companies it will invest in. But Van Vuuren, a recent fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said in a press release that he and his partners are looking for “smart and resourceful people, zealous full-time teams, and experiments in need of seed funding and hands-on help to get off the ground.”

Not to beat a dead Zuckerberg, but the overarching goal here is to keep the next Facebook in Boston—and, preferably, affiliated with Harvard. “It’s continued growth of the ecosystem for Harvard and beyond,” says Gordon Jones, director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, which is collaborating with the Experiment Fund to provide office space and resources, but is separate from the new fund. Jones calls the Experiment Fund “extremely complementary” to the i-Lab.

One of the first Harvard teams to receive an investment from … Next Page »

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There’s a new big tech company in town. In fact, it’s arguably the world’s biggest technology company (by revenue), and it’s joining the ranks of IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Google, and, most recently, Amazon, in expanding to the Boston-Cambridge area.

Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has set up a new office in Cambridge, MA. The operation will serve as a center for technology development, licensing, and outreach to local startups, investors, and researchers. The 37,000-square-foot facility at 150 CambridgePark Drive, near the Alewife subway station, is spread over two floors. The building serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the Boston-area big-data analytics firm that HP bought last winter. Vertica is in the process of moving its 150 employees from its offices in Billerica to the Cambridge facility this month, and it is currently hiring.

HP already had a sizable presence in Massachusetts, with its campus in Andover. But the new Cambridge office represents an unprecedented investment by HP in outreach and partnerships with local entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and the academic research community in the Boston area. The company hasn’t specified a firm commitment of future dollars, but just setting up the new space—including a state-of the art lab and all its associated infrastructure—has cost more than $10 million, says Chris Lynch, the chief executive of Vertica. (His HP title is vice president and general manager.)

Lynch, who is leading the new facility, calls it a “big-data center of excellence” for HP. The idea is it will be a technology hub for the firm, a bit like HP Labs in Palo Alto—but different. (Lynch wouldn’t go so far as to call it “HP Labs East.”) The center will be a base from which HP could make deals to license its technology or invest in early-stage startups alongside venture firms, he says. The center also plans to bring in students and early-stage entrepreneurs for hackathons and other tech-themed events. And it will serve as a base for other types of outreach, such as to local K-12 schools, Lynch says.

So why Alewife instead of, say, Kendall Square? “We wanted to bridge the gap between getting access to the younger people living in Cambridge … Next Page »

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Yesterday Bob told you about a special report we put together by canvassing the Xconomists—some of the world’s leading innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors—for their thoughts on what students should study to be prepared for the future.

Well, the report is now live, here, with 22 thought-provoking responses. Computing, the scientific method, culture, Chinese, and how to start something are among the areas Xconomists think students can learn to be prepared for a rapidly evolving economy. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, so be sure to delve into the full report to see what innovators like Vinod Khosla, David Baltimore, Lisa Suennen, Robert Langer, and Desh Deshpande have to say on the subject.

And we’d like you to chime in, so please share your answer to the question: What should students be studying now to prepare for 10 years from now?

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Two trends are driving the current job market: globalization, where everybody is becoming part of the economy, and innovation, which increases productivity and allows fewer people to do the same jobs. These two trends will not slow down during the next few decades. How should students train in college to build careers under these conditions?

The situation is similar to 150 years ago, when 98 perecent of people farmed. Now we need only 2 percent of the population to look after the farms. The other 96 percent are engaged in businesses that did not exist 150 years ago. Similarly, the globalization of the workforce and the concurrent productivity gains will take care of people’s current needs. New graduates over the next decades will be part of businesses that don’t exist today.

What are these new businesses? We know that the world faces several big challenges such as energy, sustainability, poverty, education and healthcare. We need to solve these problems, but no one is sure how they will lead to specific businesses. This is the challenge and the opportunity for new graduates.

New graduates who want to be players in the new economy will need a strong work ethic, rigor in their thought process, and entrepreneurial energy. In the old economy, individuals mastered a specific skill and practiced it over the course of a 50-year career. In the next 50 years, new graduates will probably change their field of practice every 10 years. They need a good work ethic to be able to learn new things. They need rigor in their thought process to learn to learn. They need to be flexible and be entrepreneurial to adapt to new businesses.

No matter what students study, whether it is technology, journalism, art, medicine, business, or law, they will have to be entrepreneurial to survive and prosper in the next 50 years. In universities they learn to solve problems. In addition to solving problems posed by others, students need to learn how to pick problems that they are passionate about solving. A big part of being an entrepreneur is to learn to pick problems that you want to solve.

I am a big believer that students should create experiential learning opportunities during their university years. They should treat the whole world and its problems as their laboratory, as opposed to confining themselves to their campuses. Picking a problem that they feel passionate about and finding a way to solve it builds confidence and gives students a taste of taking charge. New graduates have to be entrepreneurial and innovative in creating opportunities for themselves as opposed to waiting for others to do it for them.

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If luck favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur is credited with saying, we’re in danger of becoming a very unlucky nation. Little of the material taught in schools today is relevant to the future. Consider all the science and economics that has been updated, the shifting theories of psychology, the programming languages, political theories, and even how many planets our solar system has. Much, like literature and history, should be evaluated against updated, relevant priorities in the 21st century. So, what can we “teach” our students to prepare them for the future?

1. The fundamental tools of learning and analysis, as well as basic concepts

2. Knowledge of a few generally applicable topics

3. The skills to “dig deep” into their areas of interest in order to understand how these tools can be applied to one domain and to be equipped to change domains every so often

4. Preparation for jobs in a competitive and evolving global economy

5. Preparation to continuously evolve and stay current as informed and intelligent citizens of a democracy

To me, the fundamental tools of learning stem (no pun intended) from science, technology, engineering, and math. This updated curriculum should eclipse the archaic view of liberal education still favored by institutions like Harvard and Yale based on a worldview from the 1800s. Critical subject matter should include economics, statistics, mathematics, logic and systems modeling, current (not historical) cultural evolution, psychology, and computer programming. Furthermore, certain humanities disciplines such as literature and history should become optional subjects, in much the same way as physics is today (and, of course, I advocate mandatory physics study).

Finally, English and social studies should be replaced with the scientific process, critical thinking, rhetoric, and analysis of current news—imagine a required course each semester where every student is asked to analyze and debate topics from every issue of a broad publication such as The Economist, Scientific American, or Technology Review. Such a curriculum would not only provide a platform for understanding in a more relevant context how the physical, political, cultural and technical worlds function, but would also impart instincts for interpreting the world, and prepare students to become active participants in the economy. After all, what is the job of education?

Should we teach our students what we already know, or prepare them to discover more? Memorizing the Gettysburg address is admirable but ultimately worthless; understanding history is interesting, but not as relevant as topics from the Economist; a student who can apply the scientific process or employ critical thinking skills to solve a big problem has the potential to change the world or at least get a better-paying job. No wonder half the college graduates who fill jobs actually fill jobs that don’t need a college degree! Their degree is not relevant to adding value to an employer. Often, in my view, it is even less relevant to being an intelligent voter in a democratic economy. Most graduates cannot read the Economist and separate “facts,” “assumptions by the writer,” “biases,” “projections,” or “conclusions and their validity” in a critical way.

I’d also suggest tackling several general and currently relevant topic areas such as genetics, computer science, systems modeling, econometrics, linguistics modeling, traditional and behavioral economics, and bioinformatics (not an exhaustive list). Not only do these topics expose students to a lot of useful and current information, theories, and algorithms, they may in fact become platforms to teach the scientific process—a process that applies to (and is desperately needed for) logical discourse as much as it applies to science, and of much future learning in general. Even if the specific information becomes irrelevant within a decade (who knows where technology will head next; Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone didn’t exist in 2004, after all), it’s incredibly useful to understand the current frontiers of science and technology as building blocks for the future, more so than understanding history or Kafka.

If we had enough time in school, I would suggest we do everything. Sadly that is not realistic, so we need a prioritized list of basic requirements because every subject we do cover excludes some other subject given the fixed time we have available. We must decide what is better taught during the limited teaching time we have, and what subjects are easier learnt during personal time or as post-education pursuits. For instance, passions like music and its history may be best left to self-pursuit, while exploring the structure and theory of music may be a way to teach critical tools!

For some small subset of the student body, pursuing passions and developing skills in subjects such as music or sports can be valuable, and I am a fan of schools like Juilliard, but in my view this must be in addition to a required general education. It’s the lack of balance in general education which I am suggesting needs to be addressed. Setting music and sports aside, with the critical thinking tools and exposure to the up-and-coming areas mentioned above, students should be positioned to discover their first passion and begin to understand themselves, or at the least be able to keep up with the changes to come, get (and maintain) productive jobs, and be intelligent citizens.

After grasping the fundamental tools of learning and some broad topical exposure, it’s valuable to “dig deep” in one or two topic areas of interest. For this, I prefer some subject in science or engineering rather than literature or history (bear with me; I’ll explain in a minute). Obviously, it’s best if students are passionate about a specific topic, but it’s not critical as the passion may develop as they dig in (some students will have passions, but many won’t have any at all). The real value for digging deep is to learn how to dig in; it serves a person for the duration of their life: in school, work, and leisure.

If students choose options from traditional liberal-education subjects, they should be taught in the context of the critical tools mentioned above. If students want jobs, they should be taught skills where future jobs will exist. If we want them as intelligent citizens, we need to have them understand critical thinking, statistics, economics, how to interpret technology and science developments, and how global game theory applies to local interests. Traditional international relations and political science are passé as base skills and can easily be acquired once a student has the basic tools of understanding.

Back to history and literature for a moment; these are great to wrestle with once a student has learned to think critically. My contention is not that these subjects are unimportant, but rather that they are not basic or broad enough “tools for developing learning skills” as they were in the 1800s, because the set of skills needed today has changed. Furthermore, they are topics easily learned by someone trained in the basic disciplines of thinking and learning that I’ve defined above: this isn’t as easy the other way around. A scientist can more easily become a philosopher or writer than a writer can become a scientist.

Besides, physics is a much more important tool to understand the science and technology that drives modern life than history is, not to mention that it’s far more useful in helping someone understand how her car or refrigerator works. This makes it all the more concerning that many states don’t require physics to graduate from high school but do require many years of history classes—a lopsided and poor use of student time. University education continues this tradition, especially as students flock to the “easier/less work” courses. If subjects like history and literature are focused on too early, it is easy for someone not to learn to think for themselves and not to question assumptions, conclusions, and expert philosophies—this can actually do a lot of damage. On the other hand, with the right critical lens, history, philosophy, and literature can help creativity and breadth by opening the mind to new perspectives and ideas. Still, learning about them is secondary to learning the tools of learning.

In the end, school is a place where every kid should have the opportunity to become a potential participant in whatever they might want to tackle in the future, with an appropriate focus not only on what they want to pursue but also, pragmatically, what they will need to do to be productively employed. By embracing thinking and learning skills, and adding a dash of irreverence and confidence that comes from being able to tackle new arenas (creative writing may have a role here, but Jane Austen does not make my priority list), hopefully they will be lucky enough to help shape the next few decades or at least be intelligent voters in a democracy and productive participants in their jobs. At the very least they should be able to evaluate how much confidence to place in a New York Times study of 11 patients on a new cancer treatment from Mexico or a health supplement from China and to assess the study’s statistical validity and whether the treatment’s economics make sense. And they should understand the relationship between taxes, spending, balanced budgets, and growth better than they understand 15th century English history.

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From cloudy Seattle to the vast suburbs of Silicon Valley, we covered a lot of ground on MIT Sloan’s recent technology trek, which concluded with a leg in Boston.

The first stop was Seattle where it was predictably raining. Visiting Amazon, Microsoft, and Adobe, we came away with an appreciation for how much tech activity is actually going on in that city.

At Microsoft, we got to talk to alumni about what it’s like to work there. Yes, it’s a large company and therefore bureaucratic, they confessed. But, the huge plus is that they have the resources to work on some very innovative projects. Amazon also was big, but the theme there was its quirkiness. In addition to all of the desks being made out of doors, they also have whiteboards everywhere, even in the elevators. I made sure to leave an “MIT Sloan was here” tag in one of the elevators!

Adobe seemed like a more typical office where they provide a pleasant work environment with lots of exposed brick and wood. Overall, I could really see myself enjoying working in Seattle.

Moving on to Silicon Valley, it was noticeably sunnier and warmer. It was also a lot bigger. In Seattle, you could probably get by with just a bike and public transit, but good luck to anyone who tries that in Silicon Valley. Here, you definitely need a car. Being settled with a family might help too, as the area is comprised of endless suburbs punctuated by large office parks where the tech companies are located.

If you want to live where the action is, you’d need to get a job in San Francisco or do the 40-minute commute each way and hope for no traffic. I guess I should point out that Palo Alto does have a downtown, but it’s just two or three streets and most people would still have to drive there.

As for the tech companies, most of the ones we visited were in Silicon Valley and all offered quite a lot of amenities compared to what we saw in Seattle. Free food, gyms, yoga classes, dry cleaners, and acupuncture were just some of the perks you get at most of these companies. I guess they need these things to entice people not only to live away from the city, but also to work some pretty long hours.

For example, the employees at Facebook—who all seemed to be in their 20s—joked that working at some firms in the Valley is like working in a sweatshop. Employees are expected to work extremely hard, but they also provide an endless amount of food that includes a rotating candy of the week. Facebook keeps its employees well fed, caffeinated, and hydrated with the largest cafeteria of all the tech companies we visited.

Google had a similar environment with lots of … Next Page »

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The world is only going to become more technological and more global in the next decade. Students should be getting a solid enough grounding in mathematics, probabilistic thinking, physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering that they understand these ways of thinking and the values of these fields. They also need a liberal arts grounding and, particularly, well developed verbal and writing skills.

Finally, they need enough experience with the rest of the world that they are comfortable interacting with people who come from different cultures and in foreign venues. A foreign language is often a very valuable asset and for people who have backgrounds in multiple cultures—learning the languages of their parents can be an extremely effective preparation for a global career.

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The Who once sang, “I hope I die before I get old.” Despite their best efforts to exit the planet early, most of them didn’t. They and their fellow Baby Boomers represent the greatest technology and business opportunity of the 21st Century.

It is typical for each of us to be drawn to areas for which we feel the most affinity. For that reason, most students looking forward see themselves surrounded by people of a similar age while they conjure up products and services attractive to their peers. I teach an MBA class at the Haas School at U.C. Berkeley and so many of the students have great ideas on how to innovate in areas deeply relevant to their day-to-day worlds. The problem is: that is not where the action is. If you are a student today preparing to be the Steve Jobs or Oprah of the next generation, you should be thinking a lot more about what your parents and grandparents need than what would interest your friends.

There are approximately 76 million baby boomers (people born during the years 1945 and 1964). The first of the boomers turns 65 years old in 2011 at a rate of approximately 10,000 people per day, and that trend will continue for the next 20 years. According to the Census Bureau, an estimated 72 million people, or 19.3 percent of the population, will be 65 and older by 2030, compared with 40 million, or 13 percent last year. By 2030, people aged 18 to 24 will represent 9.1 percent of the population, down from 9.9 percent in 2010, according to the Census Bureau. The share of people aged 25 to 44 will drop to 25.5 percent from 26.8 percent. Young people: it is time to start thinking old-you are outnumbered. The best thing you could possibly study is how to conceive of technologies, products, and services that would appeal to the aging demographic—that is where the spending and trending power will reside. “No other force is likely to shape the future of national economic health, public finances and policy making,” analysts at Standard & Poor’s wrote in a recent report, “as the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging.”

According to various reports, Boomers already control over 80 percent of personal financial assets and more than 50 percent of U.S. discretionary spending power. A MetLife study shows Boomers stand to inherit over $11.6 trillion in their lifetime in addition to the incomes they make, and the vast majority of Boomers expect to work through their retirement. Boomers already comprise over half of all consumer spending and yes, while they account for over 75 percent of all purchases of prescription drugs and a whole lot of chronic illness (itself a stunningly large business opportunity), they also account for about 80 percent of all travel purchases.

For those of you who think of the Boomers as old and out of touch, note that retirees age 65 and older are the fastest-growing group of social networking site users, according to the Pew Research Center, which adds that over half of baby boomers use social networking sites. If you think that the latest and greatest technology doesn’t apply to the older crowd, you are wrong. New technology is essential to finding ways for Boomers to maintain their vibrancy and independence, as well as ways for us to reduce the skyrocketing costs in our current healthcare system, something that all economists agree is essential to maintaining our national economic viability.

Accordingly, students today would be best served by studying the fields that swirl around and intersect with the fields of gerontology and geriatrics. This means everything from the study of aging in medicine to the study of architecture, engineering and finance as it applies to the Boomer opportunity.

The future of caring for older Americans lays in technology, with vast green field opportunities available in the design of technologies and services that enable extending health and psychiatric well-being. Just one area, Alzheimers’, today costs the U.S. $172 billion annually; by 2020 this cost will be $2 trillion and by 2050, $20 trillion according to recent reports, and that is just one disease that needs innovation, both in treatment and in patient management.

Beyond healthcare, there is a screaming demand for technologies that ensure mobility, enable physical and financial autonomy, provide for social connectivity, and deliver education and work-place skills to those who are looking to their second or third career. People of a certain age don’t want and often can’t use the same products and services that appeal to the young, but also don’t want to buy things that make them feel old. Striking that balance is the innovation opportunity of the next several decades.

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My initial response to this question was, “Chinese!” I was only half joking. English is the most popular second language in the world and in our increasingly connected world, the people who have an understanding of other languages—particularly Chinese—will be better equipped.

As far as computers go, I studied computer languages in school and even though I wish I had studied different “human” languages, I think understanding computer languages will become even more important in the future, since computers are the universal tools of our time. Practically every aspect of our lives has a computer of some sort embedded into it. Having an understanding of how computers work as well as a curiosity about how to tap into their future potential will be important.

This need is especially true when you consider all of the potential applications that could be created to help us better understand biology and how the world works. We are living in an age where information technology and computing are driving the economy, and I predict computer-driven advances in synthetic biology promise to be even potentially more dramatic for the balance of the century.

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Whether you major in it or not, a fairly non-trivial amount of computer science would be helpful. The other thing is communication. One of the main things we look for when we are hiring people is their ability to write. It’s something that the average person is pretty poor at, but so much of every job today entails high proficiency at communication. I don’t know that any writing or literature or computer science need to be your majors, but if you are really good at those—if you can write a marketing pitch and put together an SQL query—you are in a really good position to find a job. You can tell a vast amount from how someone writes.

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Anything that interests them and they are passionate about today. What they will need to know in 10 years does not exist now, given the exponential growth of knowledge.

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How to sense and make sense of subtler factors that govern our behaviors, the choices we make as individuals and as part of groups. The point here is that there are some obvious physically measurable; things like body weight, miles driven, CO2 let out, around which we can develop diagnostics and policies. But these measurables are often the consequence of choices that are less tangible, like body image, the urge to stand out or blend in and so on.

I think we can sense these things as well by measuring brain activity or signs of mood changes in written communications. So as we get better at analyzing and archiving vast amounts of data we will find ourselves extending the frontiers of what we can gather. Many disciplines outside of the hard sciences will advance because of their ability to finally measure more things. So I would emphasize data analysis and also new ways of thinking of sensing.

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Here is my advice to students considering pursuing science:

—Learn how to learn (science is progressing so rapidly that whatever field you are focused on today will inevitably be different 10 years from now)

—Learn how to develop focused attention (i.e. avoid modern day distractions like Twitter)

—Master multiple science disciplines—If you can bridge disciplines you will become invaluable.

—Develop a fundamental understanding of scientific principles versus learning the latest scientific tool.

—Learn how to articulate science to all different types of stakeholders—this will be essential to getting the funding you need to pursue your discoveries.

—Science is an apprenticeship business, so find mentors early—even though science is based on rational thought it is conducted in an irrational environment.

—Learn how to embrace serendipity—most of the important discoveries don’t come from linear thought

—Grasp an early intuitive feel and understanding for extremely large or small numbers (10^ -20 and 10^ 20) and probabilistic phenomenon—Science exploration occurs at these extremes so it is just as important to understand these numbers as it is to understand what a 10 Trillion dollar debt is.

—Learn the history of science—All great new things come from combinations of old things.

—Future scientist needs to also be engineers—The best scientist will need to be able to engineer their own tools.

—Attend the 2022 USA Science & Engineering Festival!

(Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital also contributed to this post)

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I recently came across an article in Cell Science that intrigued me and gets to the core of this question. The title—”The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research”—was reason alone to pique my curiosity. What I didn’t expect was to find a powerful insight into student learning in today’s highly uncertain world.

Martin A. Schwartz, of the University of Virginia Department of Microbiology, wrote that “we don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid—the kind of stupidity inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.” Dr. Schwartz is referring to scientific education when he says “the more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.” Yet this same logic applies to other areas of learning.

Outside the classroom, “big” societal problems are multidimensional, seemingly intractable, and cut across disciplines. They involve solutions that may appear distant or daunting, and may require many steps. Students often give up on the excitement of discovery because they believe they are incapable of successfully addressing such problems.

This is unfortunate. Whatever their interests, students should find a place to study that helps young people acknowledge their “productive stupidity” and use it as a base for engaging in problem-solving and discovery. Their studies should combine the best of predictive logic—rooted in the scientific method—with a complementary logic that starts with action and is punctuated by reflection, learning, and more action. This is a method that is not just for the entrepreneur who starts a business; it is for the entrepreneurially minded person who wants to create economic and social value in the world.

Action-learning should play a much greater role in education. Students need the mind-set and tools to be successful in an environment where the assumptions they are working under change at a rapid pace and where, as Dr. Schwartz suggested, they “must be encouraged to push their way into the unknown.”

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Themselves.

Technology, markets, financial vehicles, business methodology, government regulations, entertainment, media, and so on, all aspects of our professions and our entire lives will change at a continuously increasing rate in perpetuity. Which technology, market, industry should I commit to? I don’t believe this is the most relevant question for a student. More relevant questions are: What do I want in my life? Who do I want to help? In what ways? Who needs my help? What positive changes can I contribute to? How can I learn, and continue to learn, and advance my pace of learning? What activities truly engage my passions, and my abilities? What goals can I set for myself which will drive me to excel, and to maximize my potential?…and many others.

Individuals learn, professions learn, societies learn. Young individuals who truly recognize the importance of the art of learning will place their attention on that throughout their years, and they will not only be better able to manage their futures, they will be able to contribute much more. Being prepared for the future is about accelerated learning more than picking the right path at each future fork in the road. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker, it doesn’t really matter.

One of the twentieth century’s greatest entrepreneurs, Dr. Kazuo Inamori, the founder of Kyocera Corporation, has committed throughout his professional life to technological innovation, but always towards a specific positive societal outcome. He is a student of life, and his business commitment, inseparable from his life commitment is to contribute to “the material and spiritual happiness of humanity and society.” Dr. Inamori is a stellar example of someone who first studied themselves, which prepared him and his company each step of the way, resulting in extraordinary evolution and success of their enterprise, according to their standards.

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As a father of two girls, I have actually been thinking about this quite a bit. In general, I want my kids to be prepared for a world that is going to be very, very different from the world I grew up in, largely due to the travel, communications, and the Internet. I would recommend students to be focused on the following areas:

—Language and Culture: we are living in a global economy where America is going to only be one of the dominant economic forces. It will be really important for students to be able to communicate sensitively across the globe and be sensitive to other cultural norms. The American way of doing things is not necessarily the only or the right way to do things.

—The Scientific Method: I was lucky to be a scientist in college and learn the scientific method. You know: set up your controls, test, review, repeat. Actually most software development and Internet advertising is just large version of applying the scientific method to technology. The scientific method is really a core philosophy that is very applicable to almost anything a technologist or manager does these days.

—Creative Problem Solving: The Internet, mobile devices and access to information have almost eliminated the need for memorization. At the same time, there is an information explosion. So it is more important for students to understand how to find the right information and solve problems than it is to memorize information (like when we were growing up).

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Both what we are teaching and learning, and how we are teaching and learning, are changing, very, very rapidly. The notion that there is a gold standard—a favored text or tome, a single subject-matter expert, or a single corporation with the single best practice, in any discipline—is really outdated. The ‘new normal’ is generation of information by multiple sources, and use of meta-analysis to sort for the most correct, most useful information. The winners in this era are those who can synthesize and execute, efficiently, which requires both creativity and dogged methodology.

The sorting functions we used to use for culling information required long periods of time, and the sole use of human intelligence. Now, online resources and once-high-tech search algorithms are now commonplace, and in the hands of anyone who can afford a connection to the Internet. Though most users of these tools do not understand their basic workings, they are able to use them, efficiently and effectively. Really, I see this as not only democratizing learning, but also enabling appreciation of more than a few types of intelligence. The ability to learn by rote, quickly and accurately, is less valuable than the ability to meta-process quickly, to draw information from multiple sources (and often generated in disparate fields) and synthesize conclusions, or better, a strategy, for business or technology.

So, today’s students should not only be preparing for their career contributions by learning, but also by challenging ‘facts’ and what is presented to them. It is one thing to memorize from an authorized text, but entirely another, more valuable thing, to be able to answer a question using one’s own resources, and give not only a well-synthesized answer, but also defend the sources of information which inform it. My strong advice to young people is thus to question the ‘text,’ and my strong advice to teachers is to assign questions, not only rote learning.

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[Updated, Jan. 18, 2012---The Xconomist Report on the Future of Education is live---click here.]

As the presidential race picks up steam, you know that we will be hearing a lot—a lot more, that is—about the need to create jobs. But where will those jobs come from, and what fields are really likely to spur growth over the next decade? These are questions that anyone interested in the country’s economic well-being wants answered. And they might be especially on the minds of millions of college students contemplating an uncertain job market, and millions of high school students who just finished their college applications for next fall.

There are a lot of places to turn for answers. But Xconomy decided to look no further than its own advisors, the Xconomists. This group includes some of the world’s leading innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists, and investors across an array of fields, who have a unique eye on the future. Their attention is largely on the innovation that leads to exponential growth and, ultimately, jobs. So we asked them one question designed to cut through the worry and haze:

What should students be studying now to prepare for 10 years from now?

The result, which will debut tomorrow morning, is our Xconomist Report on the Future of Education. It includes insights from the likes of Vinod Khosla, Esther Dyson, Nathan Myhrvold, and Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, along with 18 other of the nation’s leading thinkers—and doers—in innovation.

I don’t want to give too much away, but Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now an internationally known venture capitalist, asserts that an “updated curriculum should eclipse the archaic view of liberal education still favored by institutions like Harvard and Yale based on a worldview from the 1800s.” He recommends that schools (and students) put their efforts into economics, statistics, mathematics, and programming while making areas such as history and literature “optional subjects.”

For her part, Dyson, a renowned angel investor and tech guru, suggests pursuing new tools for extracting meaning from the vast amount of data being collected about a wide range of subjects. She envisions putting that data and knowledge to work to do things like inventing 3D personal printers or terraforming asteroids.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services CTO Todd Park, another of our contributors, says flatly, “Students should be studying how to start things—how to create and grow new products, initiatives, ventures, and enterprises—a skill set that never goes out of style.”

We hope you’ll check back tomorrow to read the full report and join in the debate and discussion it’s sure to inspire. We think the Xconomists have provided some valuable insights about where the future is headed—and how students can prepare themselves to make the most of it.

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When last we checked in with Gordon Jones, it was six months ago and he had just been appointed the inaugural director of the Harvard Innovation Lab. It was May, the birds were singing, the Red Sox had pulled out of their season-starting slump, and anything seemed possible.

Now the cold, dark days are upon us, and we need a place to rejuvenate our spirits as we gear up for the holiday season. Students and young entrepreneurs especially need such a place. The Harvard i-lab, as it is called, might be that place—a $20 million center whose mission is to support all Harvard students interested in entrepreneurship. And it is officially open for business as of today, complete with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, school administrators, and politicians.

The important news is that the i-lab is real, and it marks a serious and ambitious effort to foster entrepreneurship on a grand scale. The unstated goal is to keep the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg from leaving town (and Harvard) and building a multibillion-dollar company somewhere else. Will it work? Who knows, but you have to start somewhere.

Back in May, Jones talked with me about just trying to get his baby to first grade—the idea being, walk before you run. He has been heads-down since then, but I recently caught up with him about the i-lab’s opening, and the progress and challenges to date. (And yes, he hosted Zuckerberg’s recent visit to the lab.)

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far,” Jones says. “It’s genuine, the interest here, and the level of engagement across the Harvard schools is strong.” He says that the overall support from the university and the enthusiasm from the academic and business communities “exceeds what I expected.”

Jones adds, “When we first talked six months ago, there was this question of, ‘Is Harvard late to the game?’ I think this is a great time to be doing what Harvard is doing.” And that is, in his words, “trying to bring the best of Harvard’s knowledge and network and make it available to students. And being part of the Boston innovation community.”

Here are my takeaways going into the first day of school at the i-lab:

1. Jones isn’t going anywhere. Yes, he has an extremely challenging job. (You try being accountable to seven different deans across Harvard, for starters.) The fact that he’s still alive and kicking—not to mention attending lots of entrepreneurship events and getting to know students and the local business community at every turn—bodes well for the lab’s future. “You’ve got to pick your battles,” he says.

2. The lab is already active. It officially opens today, but stuff has been happening there for months already: a “startup weekend scramble,” guest speakers (the series includes Eric Ries, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Taylor), Harvard courses on entrepreneurship and global innovation, special panels, startup workshops (Alex Taussig led one about mistakes entrepreneurs make; Eric Paley did one on career choices), and one-on-one consultations with “experts in residence” and “innovation partners” … Next Page »

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