F.A. Hayek believed positive social reform would be impossible without first affecting a change in the climate of ideas. We propose to change the climate of ideas about business ethics, capitalism, and entrepreneurship. We plan to disrupt the way these topics are understood and taught. Our focus is the whole educational spectrum, including both collegiate and K-12 levels of instruction. Students will gain an understanding of ethics and principled entrepreneurship that draw upon the central features imbedded in the morality of capitalism.
Business education teaches entrepreneurship and ethics as fragmented, narrow disciplines, and capitalism as amoral or even immoral. This approach produces students and business leaders with a misunderstanding of what it means to be engaged in business. Too often, we find business leaders either apologetic for their success, complacent or engaged in fraudulent behavior.
Our core activity will be to redesign how these principles are taught. As part of that approach we will host Disruptive Innovation Conferences at Strata that will engage academic networks in higher education and K-12 to design, test, and implement a new curriculum.
The long-term outcome of this project is a fundamental change in how those who engage in the practice of business view and act in their endeavor, thus driving changes in social perceptions of capitalism in general and the practice of business in particular. To achieve this outcome we expect to grow a large network of faculty using the new curriculum in the classroom, and that as growing numbers of students are exposed to the ideas they will adopt these principles and implement them in their business practices and careers. As these ideas are shared within academic and business networks, we will see a growing contagion effect that will impact markets and society. This project will be a model for disrupting the current trend of educational practices that thwart liberty-minded education.
