Changes

Yale students generally do not like taking risks, so we need to find a way to encourage risk -taking. The top 15% of students from many schools, Yale included , are swept away to work in New York and consulting and financial companies. These are the students who are most likely to succeed with their own businessbusinesses. These are the smartest people that you want to be working on the biggest problems in the world. Instead, rational thinking about stability and security has prevented entrepreneurship from being a valid goal that they strive for. 

Yale students are passionate people, and it is really easy to excite someone about a meaningful and valuable goal. Social entrepreneurship is thus an effective way to provide motivation because it takes a different set of metrics into account and encourages people to look at impact instead of stability as "success." Clubs such as engineers without borders [[Engineers_Without_Borders|Engineers Without Borders]] take service trips and formally structure them. This allows many people to work together on a project and succeed easily where a single person may have a hard time.

Classes such as appropriate technology 'Appropriate Technology for the developing world Developing World' also align the ideas and goals of a larger set of students in a slightly more structred way to encourage innovation. These kinds of guided entrepenuership classes and clubs help to ease people into the idea of innovating. Successive failures can be demoralizing, especially for younger students, so these kinds of activities are esepcially useful for freshmen and sophomores. 

Having a larger group usually makes activities less risky, so trying to bring people together is an easy way to minimize risk. Another way this can be done is by showing 100 people that if we assign their passion/idea to a slightly more general problem, we can easily link multiple people with the same interest. Thus, 100 startups with 1 person each can easily become 10-20 groups of like-minded individuals all working towards the same end goal. This is acomplished in groups such as DFA[[Design_for_America|Design for America]], where, on the first day, everyone thrwos throws ideas onto the board, but those ideas are narrowed and focused by forming groups. Similar strategies can help other organizations. 

Finally, groups such as the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute are making progress towards structuring the process of innovation and providing mentorship at every step. Having someone who has gone through the process guide you can make students feel safe when they're starting a new company, and having a dedicated group whose goal is to incubate start-ups further reduces risk by providing experience and knowledge.