What Advice Would You Offer to the Senior and Rising Generations?

Raphael Amit shares his advice for fostering entrepreneurship and innovation in the rising generation.

The issue here is that, it’s the role of the senior generation not just to foster a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, but also, if you will, put the money where the mouth is by providing the educational aspects that would allow younger generations the tools, will enable younger generations to get the tools to actually realize their aspirations. You do that through education of younger generations, stuff like that but we at the Wharton School, actually starting today, are working with the 5th generations of one of America’s most famous and largest families and the objective of these two day, three day programs is to provide in a very innovative way, younger family members the know-how of what they need to do to realize their aspirations, and we do that by allowing them to actually work on their ideas and we give them the tools to make sense and allow them, at the end of the day, realize whether it’s worth their time, their talent and treasure to move forward with their ideas. And there’s a very structured way that we have developed over many years and working with a lot of families from around the world, in a very specific context of their family, because there’s a lot of heterogeneity across families and you can’t do that in abstraction, so you have to learn about the family, the dynamic in this family, the history of the family and with that in mind, develop a very customized approach to encouraging the young generation to innovate and engage in entrepreneurship and innovation.