The impact of role modelling in frontier tech
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The rise of entrepreneurial intention –the individual drive to start a new venture– is strongly influenced by personal and environmental factors, among which entrepreneurship education and the presence of role models stand out.
Yet, there is an inconvenient truth regarding the presence of frontier technologies in mainstream or specialized press. Deep science, complex industrial value chains and lower investment ballparks rarely make the front page. Most attempts of deep tech entrepreneurs to convert their cutting-edge innovations from laboratory research to viable businesses remain under the radar, except for the likes of Elon Musk and a few high-fliers. The question immediately arises whether new role models can encourage aspirant entrepreneurs to follow the frontier tech path, as well as behave more competitively. It would have major implications for policy makers and investors alike, prompting us to reflect on the nature, emergence, and distribution of deep tech role models, and whether their presence in public discourse is sufficient today, in the US, Europe, or Singapore.
In our collective mind, role models are persons with whom one can easily identify, demonstrate enviable qualities, generally holding likeable positions in society. They inspire people to seek higher goals, influencing their achievements and motivation, incarnating the fact that ambitious objectives are all but achievable. The prevalence of role models for founders is obvious in the popular business press full of references to entrepreneurial endeavours and successes that have influenced other entrepreneurs. In this category, a few respected tech gurus attract most of the spotlight, from Elon Musk to Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Thanks to intense media coverage associated with the direct and indirect effects of their fortunes, they have become global influencers.
Interestingly, most made their name in the digital or service industries (e.g., Paypal, Microsoft, Amazon and Virgin) before turning to the harsh realities of frontier tech. Elon Musk, heading today an impressive collection of deep tech champions -Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company- may well be the new Henry Ford or William Shockley of the 21st century. While one can only recognize the inspirational impact and leverage of Musk’s ambitions over millions of people, he may not score as high in terms of self-identification and reproducibility. True, Musk has helped popularize frontier tech tremendously by becoming a living, breathing subreddit, transcending at the same time the business world and building an audience around it. But most entrepreneurs are not familiar with those icons on an operational or personal basis. They are only exposed to a twitter thread, public market data and a constant stream of calibrated communication efforts.
Is breeding deep tech elitism counterproductive at the ecosystem level? Does the current starification smother the emergence of a new generation of glocal, rather than global, frontier tech role models?
Those are hard questions to tackle. First, the influences of role models are complex and not uniform. They can be of a positive or negative type (e.g., increasing or decreasing risk perception) over newbie and seasoned entrepreneurs alike, but even a positive effect towards an icon can end up hindering a venture’s outcomes (e.g., rebalancing ambition with operational pragmatism, hence challenging competitiveness). Second, the impact of entrepreneurs’ affect (i.e., their emotions, moods, and passions) on creativity, decision-making, judgment, and interpersonal relationships is paramount but rather overlooked in practice. At best, affect is reduced to day-to-day leadership capabilities and occasionally challenged by coaches, who struggle to connect emotions with engagement, motivation, and resilience.
Yet despite its inherent complexity, the conceptualization of inspiration, role modelling and entrepreneurial hope as cognitive capabilities align with the core capability to complete a successful entrepreneurial journey. Hope, like entrepreneurship, regards goals as unanswered calls that initially lack the requisite toolset to reach them. As a tech ecosystem, equipping deep tech entrepreneurs with high entrepreneurial hope levels is essential to provide means for dealing with the energy, creativity, foresight, and focus they need. When entrepreneurial processes are characterized by long development cycles, multiple stages, non-routineness, and imperfection, high levels of emotions are expected along the way. More frontier tech role models would naturally contribute to the entrepreneurs’ thinking patterns, challenging the consideration of their own ambitions and potentials, reflecting on their personal stakes and pressures. Scientific and industrial structures being highly hierarchical in Europe or Singapore, social ladders and incarnated ‘shortcuts to success’ are deemed to foster entrepreneurial reproducibility over time.
We believe that more diverse and distributed deep tech role models will help connect the dots between inspiration and execution. A new generation of entrepreneurs will tremendously benefit by constantly recalibrating their goals, pathways, and agency.
Local distribution. Having both global icons and a local crowd of role models appears to be a prerequisite for healthy deep tech ecosystems. Identifying people who are great leaders and founders in our daily lives, who make up the real backbone of current and tomorrow’s industrial economies, constitute a collective stimulus. Differences between clusters, regions, and countries in terms of entrepreneurship levels are often attributed to the existence and availability of role models: a region with high levels of deep tech entrepreneurship may further encourage new entrepreneurial initiatives because it is easier to find an appropriate example or obtain information or resources from peers. By promoting feedback loops, the whole frontier tech ecosystem plays the role of a vehicle to legitimize entrepreneurial aspirations and actions.
Practical inspiration. The dominant function of the role model is to “learn by example”. Social learning theory argues that individuals are attracted to people who can help them to further develop themselves by learning new tasks and skills, much more than homophilic behaviours (similarities of age, nationality, and gender). Concurrently, the positive impact of role models on motivations to pursue ambitious goals occurs mostly when the role models’ achievements appear attainable in terms of timing and abilities. Thus, tech ecosystems should spotlight a wide range of players, both from a professional lens -by making colleagues examples and not competitors- and from a social lens- by showing that the social elevator works. This will catalyse an influx of new talents, seasoned entrepreneurs, experts, and capital, essential elements of deep tech success stories.
Replication is a two-way street. Frontier tech requires new systemic and support approaches: developing a practical business not only requires significant research and development to bring them from the lab to the market, it also usually takes more time and money than launching a digital venture. To leverage their social standing and impact, future deep tech role models hold responsibility for becoming efficient ecosystem proxies by enhancing access to opportunities (a level playing field without red tape), funding (the right kind and availability of capital), knowledge (the know-how to initiate a frontier tech business) and hands-on support (the ability for all to take risks).
