I came across a post today on Sam Larbi’s blog entitled Save your job: understand the basics of business. Its a short post that gets to the heart of something that I have been thinking about for quite some time: how should engineers think about their role relative to the strategic direction of their organization? In Sam’s post he shares some insight from a fellow who had been replaced by an outsource firm. In part he writes “Looking back on it, I realize how foolish we were. We worked for a business and our job was to contribute to either making or saving money for that business. Yet we didn’t understand the basics of how the business came to profitability…” This is an interesting point that I took, not long ago, to a couple of acquaintances who teach computer science. My questions to them were along the following lines:
Do students think about the business side of the work they are training to do? Do they think about the strategic value they bring to an organization? Do they think about entrepreneurship? Do they think about intellectual property and how they might innovate to build a business? I also asked if students had an opportunity to take classes on such subjects.
The answer to the latter was yes. Students could certainly take business courses as electives in their curriculum. Most did not however. In terms of the other questions, the answers were basically ‘no’ across the board. According to my conversation, students learn a trade (coding) and most expect to land an hourly position somewhere, then expect to apprentice with a more senior developer to learn the complexities of a particular sofware product. This is certainly not a bad approach and many do quite well following this model. I cannot help but think, however, that a few minor changes to the core curriculum of a computer science program would add significant value to the skillset of a newly minted engineer. Specifically, I think a course on business strategy would be a great start and possibly a course on innovation and intellectual property. Perhaps a survey course could be created to address the gamut. The material doesn’t have to go too deep, but just deep enough to give students insight into the environment they will most likely be working. The easiest way to address this in fact, might be some cross-pollination programs among various schools at a university. GSU offers an intellectual property survey course to its business students for example, so it would be easy enough to make something similar available for the CS students.Â
Taking it one step further - consider an entrepreneurial capstone program for MBA’s, JD’s, and MSCS students that included the identification of a market oppportunity, building prototype software, and developing a business plan to take it to market. Maybe along the way you secure a trademark or file a patent or two. Not a bad way to round out a college degree. Maybe they even launch a business.
I’m sure there are schools doing this today, but my guess is that they are a minority. If you read this and know of an interesting program, let me know.
Tags: general by brent
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