<p>...An engineer wanted to create his own type of product/service such as medicine, chemicals, machinery, automobiles, digital technology, software, etc. etc? I've seen some successful moguls(Jobs, Gates) who founded innovative services but didn't go to grad school much less get a bachelors. However, after reading a few of the threads on here, it seems like there are certain fields/time where one kind of has to go to graduate school to make their own inventions.</p>
<p>JBH619, you emailed me this question, but I’d just as soon answer it here.</p>
<p>*It seems to me that the more ‘research-intensive’ a technology is, the most useful a grad degree becomes in order to commercialize said technology. Innovation is not the same as research, and the cases of Jobs, Gates, Michael Dell, or Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook) involve ideas that did not really involve much research, as all of them basically took existing, well-known, off-the-shelf components and just pieced them together to serve a new market. Their insight was therefore to see that a new market (the hobbyist home computer market) was being born and that incumbents were not serving. For example, the Apple I was little more than a simple kit that IBM, the dominant incumbent at that time, could have obviously easily created if it wanted. IBM had been building giant multimillion-dollar mainframes for years. But IBM did not want to create it because neither it nor any of the other large computer firms at that time (like DEC) saw any serious business potential in doing so. Similarly, Gates’s first product was not an operating system, but rather was an interpreter for the BASIC programming language for early home computers. Again, this was not research-intensive, as BASIC had been invented more than 10 years previous and numerous BASIC interpreters had been built for larger computers. The innovation is that nobody had built an interpreter for the home computer. </p>
<p>Hence, the difference seems to be whether you are inventing a brand-new technology or whether you are just applying technologies that are already known, but in different ways. I don’t think it’s that hard, from a technological standpoint, for somebody to build a Web 2.0 firm. Take Facebook. With just a few months of study and practice, you could probably learn how to create a website that functions like Facebook, in the sense that it allows people to join, upload their profiles and pictures, and ‘friend’ and ‘poke’ each other. {Now, granted, building such a site that can scale to millions of users and incorporates advertising revenue and widgets from third parties - that’s pretty hard, but I’m just talking about the very first version of Facebook, which was pretty simple.} The insight that Zuckerberg had was that he saw a way to target the college crowd by using college email addresses as an identifier, and this is really an ingenious business insight, not an ingenious technological insight. Same thing with YouTube - it’s not that hard to build a simple website that allows people to upload videos and comment/rate them. YouTube was simply able to take advantage of network effects in attracting more users which attracted more content creators which attracted still more users, etc. But again, that’s not really a technological innovation, but more of a marketing/strategic innovation. </p>
<p>*More regulated industries tend to place a stronger emphasis on grad degrees. Information technology, the Internet, and software have relatively few regulations, and so anybody can basically build whatever they want, put it out there, and let the market decide winners. However, health care, i.e. pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and biotech, are heavily regulated and hence requires validation of products before they are put before the consumer. I’ve never heard of somebody dropping out of college to found a successful biotech firm. Alternative energy also seems to be a sector that draws a lot of entrepreneurial interest, but through the grad school population, as any new energy firm has to fit within the existing energy infrastructure. </p>
<p>But, going to grad school to pursue innovation doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to finish grad school. The founders of Google dropped out of Stanford grad school to commercialize their research project (although, to be fair, they did complete their MS degrees). The Yahoo guys were notorious - they also dropped out of Stanford grad school, but to pursue a project that they were pursuing that had nothing to do with their grad-school research, but in fact were building on the side because they were bored silly with their grad school research. </p>
<p>In conclusion, I would say that if you already have an idea for a startup company, then you should probably try to pursue it. If you hit a wall and find that you need to know more about how to build your idea, then you can use school to learn that, including grad school if necessary. Of course, if you don’t have any idea, then you can use school, including grad school, as a way to find your idea (which is what the Google and Yahoo guys did). Or, of course, if you don’t care about entrepreneurship anyway and just want a (relatively) stable job, then you should get your degree. </p>
<p>I leave you with the words of Paul Graham:</p>
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<p>[Hiring</a> is Obsolete](<a href=“http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html]Hiring”>Hiring is Obsolete)</p>