Stopping out of School and Work: Innovation leave

One disruptive innovation idea and a new set of data surfaced recently. The idea comes courtesy of Peter Thiel, one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley. Thiel has launched a new initiative to pay promising young people $100,000 grants to “stop out” of high-school and start their own companies. Wow. The new data set comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics: contrary to popular myth, Gen X and Yers have just as much job loyalty as job-switching baby boomers. When they were 18 to 44, the Late Boomers, it turns out, had an average of 11 employers, or a job change every 2.4 years.

Mr. Thiel will offer grants of up to $100,000 for kids to drop out of school. In an offhand remark during an earnest description of the initiative in a Techcrunch interview, the contrarian Mr. Thiel – co-Founder of Paypal and seed investor in Facebook – called it “stopping out of school.”