5 CULTURAL FIT AND THE GROWTH OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Why did the strong interest in entrepreneurship develop so early and so spontaneously among members of the MIT community, particularly at a time when there was scant interest in entrepreneurship in most US universities and in the wider society? To answer that question, we must turn to the Institute's distinctive culture. As Lawrence S. Bacow ('72), former MIT professor and current president of Harvard University, suggests: "MIT is more than just a collection of buildings on the Charles River populated by brilliant students, faculty, and staff. MIT represents a particularly unique and often poorly understood culture. Anyone who seeks to replicate or simply understand MIT must first try to understand and appreciate a culture that celebrates quirkiness, choice, independence, entrepreneurship, focus, creativity, and intensity."
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This chapter will explore how entrepreneurship, in its essence, has grown out of—and been supported by—a number of features of the unique culture of MIT. By this, I mean more specifically its organizational culture, as defined by Professor Emeritus Edgar Schein
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of the MIT Sloan School of Management, which can be seen as an internal conventional wisdom that unconsciously guides the responses of members of an organization and informs how they solve everyday challenges. It signals implicitly what works and what does not, what is acceptable and unacceptable, what things mean, and what to pay attention to.
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