For our last Human-Centered Entrepreneurship class meeting, we had the pleasure of learning more about how our professors Pam Daniels and Elizabeth Lukehart shaped their career paths and got to where they are today.
After over 18 years at Leo Burnett and a year at IDEO, Pam enrolled in Northwestern’s graduate program in Product Design and Development. She noticed the hands-on, youthful environment of the adjacent Engineering Design Innovation program, and despite not having an engineering background, joined their two-week bootcamp where she met Brandon. She and Brandon, both hands-on design educators at Northwestern, now run Welcome Industries, where they “create products across disciplines and bring ideas to life through a wide range of processes”
Elizabeth didn’t take a traditional career path either. With journalism and law degrees, Elizabeth has experience working in marketing and communications, practicing law at a boutique law firm and working closely with sustainably minded companies and startups. She is passionate about drawing from her experiences to teach students about storytelling in business, lean startup methodology, and customer discovery.
Both highlighted the importance of evaluating what you enjoy, knowing what your goals and motivations are, and acknowledging the potentially zig-zagged nature of a career path.
Finding a job you love
A few key things to keep in mind when crafting your career path:
- It’s not just about what you like to do, but also how you like to work.
- Always be open to new opportunities.
- Like to learn!
- Just keep doing what you enjoy, and as Steve Dyme said, you’ll eventually find a way to make money with it.
- Have humility.
Building a human-centered career (and life)
When deciding how she wanted to progress her career, Elizabeth wondered how businesses could improve their impact on people. “What is the role of business in society? How do we create businesses that actually fulfill people versus just being a paycheck for people?” she asked. “My driving passion and motivation is to think about business from this lens, as something that can be a positive force in society and a positive force for people beyond just the paycheck aspect of it or the enriching shareholders aspect of it.”
As we have experienced over the course of this class (and not just because it’s called human-centered entrepreneurship), Pam and Elizabeth have also brought this human-centered approach to their roles as educators at Northwestern. They strive to transform their classrooms into environments that encourage and empower students to be passionate about what they are doing. A human-centered approach isn’t limited to the entrepreneurial or design spaces. Pam summed this up when she described herself as a “human-centered human”–this consideration for people underlies every aspect of her life.
Strengthening Northwestern’s entrepreneurship community
One of the central lessons of this course turned out to be how fundamental community is for entrepreneurial pursuits. This idea conflicts with the standard perception of an entrepreneur as a completely independent, trail-blazing individual. In reality, Pam explained, successful entrepreneurs are “very well grounded and supported in a cohort of people who are helping them do what they do.” For this reason, the startup community that is created on college campuses can play a formative and crucial role for student entrepreneurs.
Both Pam and Elizabeth remarked at how entrepreneurship is growing at Northwestern and across the world. Elizabeth described Northwestern as having two facets for students to practice entrepreneurship: the Farley Center, and The Garage. While The Garage focuses on launching student-run startups outside of class, Elizabeth said that the Farley Center tries to explore the definition of entrepreneurship through interdisciplinary classes. Common topics include learning how to measure success, understanding the value proposition for your users and customers, and telling your story. While Elizabeth noted that Northwestern has come a long way, she closed by saying that, “we have a lot of work to do in terms of diversity, in terms of being more inclusive, in terms of our definition of entrepreneurship.”
