‘How do I bring a change idea to make the world a better place?’

David Witt and students in his "Entrepreneurship: The Mindset and Skillset" class in the Engineering and Computer Science building. Photo by Angela Foster.

Dr. David Witt and students in his “Entrepreneurship: The Mindset and Skillset” class in the Engineering and Computer Science building. Photo by Angela Foster.

Dr. David Witt wants his students to know it’s OK to fail.

Not in the classroom, of course, but in his guidance as an entrepreneurship researcher. Sometimes, you have to fail in order to succeed.

“It’s so much fun to watch new college students begin to grapple with the idea that failure is OK; it’s OK if I fail,” said Witt, an associate lecturer of marketing and entrepreneurship in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Gary W. Rollins College of Business. “You learn from failure. Assuming you undertook a serious effort and it didn’t work out well, it just means something’s not how you thought it was. Turn it around and look at it, figure out how it is, and then adapt however necessary for that new reality and try again.

“That’s part of what we call the mindset, and we see that in successful people who bring change to the world.”

Witt, a non-tenure-track faculty member who joined UTC in 2008, splits his work week between his teaching role and his job as president and principal at ALCON Systems, a niche consulting and manufacturing firm in Dalton, Georgia. He is among a group of College of Business lecturers who combine teaching and consulting experience to bring real-world scenarios to the classroom.

“My department supports me so strongly in being able to go back and forth,” he said. “If you’re a lecturer, exposure to the community is very important for the college. I have two days a week teaching, then three days to go out and do my projects and client consulting—and I bring those experiences back to the students.

“It’s so interesting when I talk about failure and learning from failure. I use my projects as examples of what to do and what not to do.”

The reality, he said, is that success is a result of learning from failure.

“I’ve learned from successful entrepreneurs that it’s about how you learn from testing, trial-and-error, and controlling your risks,” Witt said. “What are their steps, their methods, their ways of thinking? How can we avoid failure as much as humanly possible? It’s OK to fail as long as you’re doing your job seriously and taking a learning attitude toward it.”

During the spring semester, Witt is spending his Tuesdays and Thursdays on the UTC campus teaching Entrepreneurship: The Mindset and Skillset, a freshman-level generation education course; Foundations of Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation, an upper-level class designed for marketing and entrepreneurship majors; and a pair of Marketing Research courses.

The crux of his teaching, he said, revolves around the notion of “How do I bring a change idea to make the world a better place?”

“When we look at entrepreneurship, it’s the change story,” he explained. “Anytime we see something new in the world, a new product, a new service, a new way of doing something—that’s change. Somebody decided to bring that to market, decided to work it out to figure it out—everything from a digital recorder or cell phones or even something like a better pen.

“What I research and teach are the important skills for bringing these change ideas to life.”

The cross-disciplinary freshman-level mindset and skillset course takes place in a College of Engineering and Computer Science classroom. Approximately half the students are engineering majors, but “Fletcher Hall business majors” walk over there as do students in other majors, Witt said.

“This is an across-the-university class: creativity, innovation and how you approach the world to bring change are truly cross-disciplinary and don’t belong in one department,” he said. “We draw from psychology. We draw from operations and business. We draw from art. There are so many places we bring all of these ideas together.

“And I have to tell you … those freshmen are sometimes the most exciting to talk to about our concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Dr. David Witt, a non-tenure-track faculty member who joined UTC in 2008, splits his work week between his teaching role and his job as president and principal at ALCON Systems.

The Foundations of Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation course, held in the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Mapp Building location, brings together students deeper in their college careers. “Those students are just as enthusiastic as the freshmen,” he said, but they have progressed to the point where “they’ve got their projects in front of them and they’re trying to figure out what the heck to do with them.”

“We take their ideas in the classes and let them play with them and begin developing them,” he said. “It can be a little daunting, so they get quiet about this time in the semester. In another month or so, they’ll be really vocal.”

Witt, principal at ALCON System since 1985, is the recipient of four degrees—a bachelor’s in organizational management from Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, in 2004; a master’s in applied computer science from Kennesaw State University in Georgia in 2006; an MBA from UTC in 2007; and a doctoral degree in business administration from Kennesaw State in 2019.

Teaching wasn’t in his original career plans, he said, and obtaining a degree wasn’t part of the equation until his own children were closing in on college age.

“I had dropped out. I went to night courses for a long time and never completed it,” he explained, “but I went back to school because my kids were wavering on going to college. They said, ‘Dad, you’ve got this business going and it’s doing great, so we don’t need to go to college, right?’”

In earning the bachelor’s degree, “I started to see the value,” he said. “I realized in my business that I wasn’t doing everything best practices, so I started incorporating the research learnings into the practice,” which led him to pursue a master’s in computer science.

“At that point, I was purely self-centered about how I improve my business, so when the opportunity for the MBA at UTC came up—and I could do that and still run the business—it was golden,” he said.

Not long after completing the MBA, he received a phone call asking if he wanted to teach a night course at UTC. “I thought I’d do it for a semester or two; it would look good on a resume,” he said, “and I fell in love with teaching because I saw the impact it makes. I never left.”

These days, much of his teaching revolves around developing change ideas that “might make the world a better place.”

“The students come up with some crazy ideas that might just make a difference, so there’s my impact,” he said. “They learn about design thinking as a process, which is an extremely powerful way to address complicated problems. They brainstorm and come up with some pretty cool ideas that could be pieces of a viable real solution.

“I want to emphasize the change idea. That’s what I’m pumped about—that we can innovate, we can fix problems, we can bring change. That’s who I am.”