Students in the sciences need to learn entrepreneurial skills

Douglas Arion’s article about entrepreneurship education for physicists (Physics Today, August, 2013, page 42) is exactly on point: All working physicists today need entrepreneurial skills, especially if they hope to do anything new. However, offering special degrees to a few is not enough; rather, the basic practices of finance, marketing, negotiation, and bureaucratic survival should be taught to all science majors. We spend much of our lives and most of our creative energies working on those challenges, not physics. Even Arion’s “stage–gate” model of innovation (see the article’s figure 2) has “gates” manned by gatekeepers and toll takers. Getting past them is as essential to success as excellence in any of the R&D stages.