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Innovation is what drives businesses and, as a result of that, economies and lifestyle. Therefore, it is very important to create environments that facilitate innovation, be it within your business, in school or universities.

Stanford has recently launched an early stage venture fund called SSE Ventures (Stanford Student Enterprises). It is a student association with $13 million in assets and several hundred employees trying to help the university’s undergraduate and graduate students start innovative companies. Stanford is the place where Sun, Yahoo, Google and other technology companies found their start. Now, Stanford is about to get even more student projects and businesses off the ground. SSE Ventures will invest $50,000 to $100,000 per project, according to the fund’s website.

Although some argue that Stanford wants to fill its pockets (the university takes a share in the companies it funds), I strongly believe that programs such as SSE Ventures facilitate innovation. Stanford builds a bridge which offers students a way to get beyond pure theories and build practical innovative technologies instead. More universities and schools should try to build programs that aim at making it easier for their students to do something practical and to transfer their unique ideas into valuable projects. This way you will go and important step forward towards better education, more knowledge and a better lifestyle in the long run.

It is my impression that American universities have a better underlying educational system than German universities (I’m based in Germany), but even US universities can do much better. Anyway, in order to underscore my theory that innovations as well as successful companies often find their start in universities, I would like to point out something interesting I read in the German economy magazine Wirtschaftswoche last week:

Over a 30-year time frame, the top companies (global players) founded in Europe are older than the global players founded in the USA on the overage. This means that, during this time frame, fewer successful global companies were started in Europe than in the USA. Why is that? Well, one important reason is that Europe has not done enough to facilitate innovation. The USA have been better at this task and that is why more companies founded in the USA became global players than in Europe during the past three decades. It is notable that most newly-founded and later highly successful businesses were technology companies. Europe doesn’t have as many technology firms as the United States. Don’t get me wrong, Europe’s economic and financial system is good, in my opinion, and, speaking of Germany, many companies based in the European Union deliver first-class products and services. But if we ignore these additional factors for a moment and look exclusively at innovation as a result of education in the USA as opposed to Europe, we will see that Europe lacks univerisites such as Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). These universities try to actively encourage student projects and experiments which will ultimately lead to innovation, business ideas and maybe good companies.

Innovation facilitation is not only important in education and on an economy-wide level, of course. It is just as important within your business (or family, for that matter). By assisting people with getting their own ideas and turning these ideas into something special, you are probably on a good way to promote innovation, which will in turn lead to better efficiency and possibly even to happier and healthier lifestyles.