When you hear the word "entrepreneur," what comes to mind? If you're picturing a hoodie-wearing tech founder pitching to venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, you're not alone, but you're also missing the bigger picture.
Dr. Robert Nason, Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management, is on a mission to expand our understanding of what entrepreneurship actually looks like. In a recent episode of the HeroX Innovation Leadership Speaker Series (below), he challenges the innovation community to embrace what he calls the "plurality of entrepreneurship," recognizing that innovation happens in radically different contexts, from high-tech labs to informal economies in developing nations.
"I think too often we have a too-constrained view of what it looks like. You know, we gravitate towards some kind of dominant prototype."
Innovation Born from Necessity
Dr. Nason's research takes him far from the typical startup ecosystem. He studies entrepreneurship in contexts of poverty and informality, working with coffee farmers in Colombia and entrepreneurs in the townships of Cape Town, South Africa. What he's discovered challenges our assumptions about who entrepreneurs really are.
"Most of the rich are entrepreneurs," Dr. Nason observes. "But most entrepreneurs are poor."
More than just an academic observation, it's the recognition that innovation happens everywhere, often under the most challenging conditions. And here's the fascinating twist: entrepreneurs working with limited resources naturally practice principles that Silicon Valley had to "discover" and brand as innovation best practices.
The Unexpected Common Ground
Across his research, Dr. Nason has found universal similarities among all entrepreneurial contexts, from established family firms to informal street vendors. Perhaps most striking is that innovators in low-resource environments instinctively practice "fail fast" and Minimum Viable Product (MVP) principles. When you don't have capital to waste, you test quickly, learn rapidly, and iterate based on real feedback. What's often a luxury-methodology in Silicon Valley, is simply survival in other contexts.
This insight should resonate deeply with the HeroX community, where agile, MVP-style approaches consistently lead to breakthroughs in crowdsourced challenges—from disability health to aerospace and energy.
Diffusing the Entrepreneurial Mindset
Beyond his research, Dr. Nason is putting these insights into practice by developing McGill's entrepreneurship curriculum. And his vision extends far beyond the business school. The goal, he explains, is to, "Diffuse the entrepreneurial mindset as widely as we can," reaching students across Law, Medicine, Engineering, and Arts.
Why does this matter? Because the most interesting innovations happen at the intersections.
Designing for Serendipity
McGill's strategy centers on creating what Dr. Nason calls "new collisions:"deliberately bringing together students and ideas from different disciplines to form complementary teams. It sounds simple, but it requires intentional design.
Take CarbiCrete, a carbon-negative concrete company that emerged from McGill's ecosystem. The breakthrough happened when technical expertise (an Engineering lab post-doc with deep materials knowledge) collided with business acumen (a business school alum who could commercialize the innovation). Neither could have built the company alone.
This example embodies Dr. Nason's philosophy about organizational innovation:
"We can think more about how we architect that. How do we build for serendipity, design for it, and allow those kinds of things to happen."
You can't force serendipity, but you can create the conditions for it to thrive.
Practical Wisdom for Innovators and Leaders
Dr. Nason offers concrete advice for two key groups:
For aspiring innovators: Use the university setting (or any low-risk environment) to explore and experiment. Take that “weird” class. Pursue that unconventional project. The key is to minimize the cost of failure while maximizing opportunities for learning.
For leaders and faculty: Shift from protector to enabler. Your role isn't to control or constrain the next generation's ideas; it's to encourage them, develop their capabilities, and give them permission to "go out and try something else."
The HeroX Connection
Dr. Nason's philosophy aligns perfectly with the HeroX platform's mission. Whether it's team-matchmaking capabilities for crowdsourcing challenges (like NASA's electricity challenge) or connecting global communities to solve problems together, HeroX embodies the spirit of bringing complementary, interdisciplinary teams together across traditional boundaries.
The innovation ecosystem needs platforms and approaches that recognize entrepreneurship's true plurality that value both the college graduate and the informal economy innovator, that create collisions between engineers and artists, and that design intentionally for the serendipitous moments that change everything.
Watch the full conversation with Dr. Robert Nason on the HeroX Innovation Leadership Speaker Series for more insights on building a culture that "designs for serendipity" in your organization.
Featured Organization: McGill University Desautels Faculty of Management - https://www.mcgill.ca/desautels/
Dobson Centre for Entrepreneurship: https://www.mcgill.ca/dobson/
McGill Success Story: CarbiCrete - https://carbicrete.com/
Explore the HeroX Innovation Leadership Speaker Series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQtyw_9NmiwHSzz-rsFLv9xOzaWc9Zo5_
Connect With the Speakers:
Dr. Robert Nason — https://www.linkedin.com/in/rnason/
Jamie Elliott (Host) — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-elliott/
