American workers, entrepreneurs, small business persons and the educational delivery system that should be supporting them are all in trouble.
We could not be more in need of an overhaul than we are right now. It’s time for a disruptive innovation to restore the worker to the global family, put business formation and development on a firm foundation and align the education/training community to support them. To create this environment is no small task. It can’t be done by incremental change. Our world as we know it has disappeared and no one is really sure what will replace it, nor has anyone yet put forth a creative idea for that replacement—until now. My solution looks like this:
- Current training and education models can only be fixed by a complete replacement of instructor-centric models with team-centric models and the integration of project/problem-based curricula
- Businesses need to find creative and innovative ways to apply technology to product/service offerings in order to increase revenues, avoid costs or improve services. To be successful, businesses will have to create new jobs or redefine existing jobs by leveraging technology in new and innovative ways and to do it before the competition does. To be sustainable these jobs need to be designed so they cannot easily be outsourced.
- Combine 1 and 2 into a single innovative model for the mutual benefit of workers, entrepreneurs and small business owners.
The Solution As I See It
The single innovative model mentioned above is what I am calling the Workforce & Business Development Center (WBDC). It is comprehensive and adaptive. The WBDC will require a radical rethinking of how we educate our students, train our workers promote entrepreneurship and support small businesses. It must:
- Exploit technology for sustainable business and job creation
- Concurrently meet the needs of business and academe
- Continuously adapt and align to changing global and regional markets
- Be based on the concept of a “classroom without walls”
- Include learn-to-work and work-to-learn components
- Support entrepreneurship and business formation
- Utilize team-centric learning & discovery models
- Be based on a problem/project-based learning model
- Be financially sound and create social value
- Provide safe harbor for career development
- Rekindle the American “spirit of innovation”
- Offer growth opportunities to every worker
- Meaningfully integrate the business environment
- Be scalable, replicable and robust
The proposed WBDC Model coupled with the concept of a business incubation center described below is a disruptive innovation that stands unique among WBDC Models. I predict that it will usher in a new and invigorating approach to career and professional development for every worker regardless of their station in life and their career and professional development goals.
