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What’s Wrong?
Done right, engineering and computer
science teach technological craft, but
all too often without complementary
instruction in how to implement solutions in the real world of institutions.
In fact, engineering is too often taught
without regard for cultural, social, and
political context. 3 Internships, while
useful, are no substitute for acquiring
the formal skills of problem solving.
For law students, too, we give them
too limited a toolkit. Whereas public
interest litigation, strategic use of contracts, and knowledge of how to craft
legislation and regulation are vital
mechanisms for public problem solving, the agile and flexible tools of technology, data, and innovation have been
woefully absent from the curriculum.
Our public policy schools are simi-
larly out of date. For example, of the
top 25 public policy schools as ranked
by U.S. News and World Report in 2019,
none required studentsa to take even
basic coursework in data science. For-
mer Woodrow Wilson School Dean and
head of New America Foundation Anne-
Marie Slaughterb writes that our public
policy schools are teaching a method of
problem solving that is “built in a dif-
ferent time and for a different time—
an era with fewer citizens, a slower
pace of information dissemination,
and a data capacity that is a fraction
of what we have today.” 8 In a recent
a http://www.naspaa.org
b http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/anne-marie_
slaughter
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY have progressed exponen- tially, making it possible for humans to live longer, healthier,morecreativelives.
The explosion of Internet and mobile
phone technologies have increased
trade, literacy, and mobility. 11 At the
same time, life expectancy for the poor
has not increased and is declining. 9
As science fiction writer William
Gibson famously quipped, the future
is here, but unevenly distributed. With
urgent problems from inequality to
climate change, we must train more
passionate and innovative people—
what I call public entrepreneurs—to
learn how to leverage new technology to tackle public problems. Public
problems are those compelling and
important challenges where neither
the problem is well understood nor
the solution agreed upon, yet we must
devise and implement approaches,
often from different disciplines, in an
effort to improve people’s lives.
Problem solving has been identified as one of the most important
skills a graduate of engineering and
computer science, as well as graduates of other professional schools,
must have in the 21st century. Yet, as
someone who has been tenured in
both law and engineering and taught
in a public policy school, I can report that our universities are failing
to teach future professionals how to
tackle complex problems in a rapidly
changing world.
The primacy of technology in our
daily lives combined with the urgent
need to design and implement solu-
tions to public problems require a new
curriculum of public entrepreneurship.
Public entrepreneurship teaches
students to tackle public problems in
the public interest. First, it demands
working together in teams and with
real-world partners across disciplinary silos. Second, it teaches participants to go beyond vague issues to
define actionable problems. Third,
public entrepreneurs learn to use the
tools of both data and collective intelligence to get smarter about both
problems and solutions. Fourth, they
learn to design solutions together
with those they are trying to help by
adopting more participatory and democratic ways of working and, finally,
they learn how to implement measurable solutions in the real world that
improve people’s lives.
DOI: 10.1145/3325811
Viewpoint
Public Entrepreneurship
and Policy Engineering
Training the next generation of leader and problem solver.