2 million minutes: how high school students in China, India and Indiana are spending their time.

AuthorHromadka, Erik
PositionCover story - Company overview

TWO MILLION MINUTES that shape a lifetime--that's one way to describe the four years of high school. But could those minutes also be shaping the future of our economy?

That's the question that Bob Compton is raising as he travels the country to promote his latest project, a documentary called "Two Million Minutes" that highlights the lives of high school students in Indiana and compares them to similar students in India and China.

Compton, who spent much of the past 20 years investing in entrepreneurial companies in Indiana, is on a mission to raise awareness about the stark differences he sees between the focus and motivation of Indiana students and their counterparts in the world's two most populous countries.

After witnessing a growing number of technology jobs being outsourced to India, Compton set out to discover what he describes as an "economic tectonic shift" that is taking place in the world. In 2005, he traveled across India, keeping track of his experiences and observations in what would later become a book titled "Blogging through India." While there were many cultural differences in food, religion and business, it was education that made the biggest impact on Compton.

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"The seminal moment for me was in a first grade classroom in Bangalore when I asked 5- and 6-year-olds what they wanted to be and most of them said engineers or scientists," Compton explains. Back in the United States, he asked the same question and found a lot of children who aspired to be rock stars and professional athletes.

"The one word that was never mentioned was 'engineer' and that just shook me to the core," Compton says of the American students. "Here is a society that is four times larger than us and they are all marching in a direction of strong math and science skills, which I happen to believe are going to be the skills that will allow people in the 21st century to earn high wages."

So Compton decided his next mission would be to sound the alarm about the impending workforce crisis that is brewing in our schools and threatening future jobs.

CREATING INDIANA JOBS

Compton knows a thing or two about creating jobs. After graduating from Principia College in 1978, his dream was to be the president of IBM. He applied for a job with the computer company and was assigned to Indiana, where Compton learned about technology and finance by selling to the state's banking community.

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Compton left IBM and completed a Harvard MBA in 1984. After working for a small, high-tech firm, he returned to Indiana. However, instead of providing technology to financial companies, Compton began working to deliver investment dollars to new technology ventures. Prom 1988 until 1997, he served as general partner of CID Equity Partners, an Indianapolis venture capital firm.

Compton was the lead investor in more than 20 businesses, five of which went on to have successful public offerings. For example, an investment of $2.3 million helped Software Artistry in Indianapolis...

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