Las Vegas Shootings: Ethical dilemmas for Entrepreneurship Educators

The following reflection was written and shared by Dr. Kannan-Narasimha, Associate Professor of Management at USD's School of Business.

The Las Vegas shooting shook many of us to the core; being one of the deadliest gun attacks in the US.

However, when I woke up on Monday morning, reading my printed edition of the WSJ Business & Finance, I was ignorant of the attack. The most interesting news that caught my attention, given my focus on innovation, was the “Market’s hottest videogame isn’t finished yet” (pp.B1). It was about Bluehole Studio’s “Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds” a multiplayer survival game that has raked in millions of dollars in sales without being a finished product. In this game, apparently 100 players parachute to an island and have to be the last one standing. There were pictures of men with guns and bomb blasts behind them.

It was ironic- in the most heinous way imaginable, that some version of this game happened on Sunday night in Vegas. This made me question yet again: What is the role of entrepreneurship educators when it comes to training our students on ethical issues relating to entrepreneurship and innovation management? In the past few years the world that we live has become a place where shooting children in elementary schools and people in malls and concerts, has unfortunately become common. While we blame gun control, the government, the shooters, their families etc. what if we stepped back for a minute to see how we contribute to this mess and how we can make a better place for our next generation?

Given my emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation management, I know that most entrepreneurial courses teach students how to develop prototypes, obtain market validation and write pitch decks. As educators does our responsibility end there to teach them to launch successful products and services? Shouldn’t we be teaching the social impact of their innovations; the positive and negative consequences –not just the total addressable markets, term sheets and profits? For example, an idea similar to Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds looks great as it relates to the profit earning potential and is likely to have won any entrepreneurship competition.

However as entrepreneurship educators can we take responsibility to teach students beyond winning entrepreneurship competitions and profit potential? How about empathy and compassion through videogames rather than aggression and fear -either by shaping the ideas about the product or service or by the way we structure the syllabus. What about a game that simulates how to save victims of a natural disaster? How about including separate points in the assignments that highlight the ethical and moral issues with their innovation and so forth. What are the metrics to assess whether students are thinking critically of what is the impact of developing violence based games? Does this increase the chances of such events? There is adequate evidence that violence in media leads to aggression, desensitization of violence and lack of sympathy for the victims. Why are we not discussing critical events like this and the impact of such innovations in innovation and entrepreneurship classes? Universities teach sustainable entrepreneurship or social entrepreneurship as its own course. My emphasis here is to include these notions of empathy, compassion and social impact in mainstream entrepreneurship courses rather than as a separate category- business idea with a social conscience versus business ideas without a social conscience. The latter category must be unacceptable and as educators we must start thinking actively about this as we teach business courses to the next generation of students.

This reminds me of Cardinal Turkson’s recent address to Santa Clara University where he suggested, goodness and truth do not flow automatically from technological and economic power. As a society we lag in human responsibility, values and conscience. Thus teaching students how to be successful as entrepreneurs teaches them the technological and market skills. Do we put equal emphasis in entrepreneurship classes on human responsibility, values and conscience? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we did?

p.s. I have nothing against Bluehole Studio’s “Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds.” It just happened to be the front cover of WSJ on the day that the shootings were covered and is an example of a commercially successful entrepreneurial idea.