Teaching Entrepreneurship
A friend asked: “If entrepreneurship is a “science” that can be taught and replicated then how can developing countries teach students to be entrepreneurs, create startups to improve economy, and solve unemployment problem? I told him: “It must start by promoting more on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) because they are the foundation of innovations. Without technology innovations, it would be difficult for entrepreneurs to create startups that can make a difference to the economy.”
When I taught in Asia, I heard a lot of talks about entrepreneurship and startups but I had not seen much actions. When visited universities, I found entrepreneurship classes were mostly taught in Business school where students learned about economics, management and finance. A professor told me that they have a program to teach students on how to start companies but even students did create startups, after a short time, most failed. I explained to him that technology entrepreneurship should be taught in Technology school, not Business school. The commonly made mistake of Business school is they treat startup just like a small company. But startup is NOT a small company. A company is a business that has knowledge of customers, products or services as well as the market. A startup is a “temporary organization” looking for customers and searching for business where the market is still unknown.
Startup education should focus on the creation of innovated products that can solve problems or meet a need first, not how to start a company. Therefore teaching entrepreneurship to science or technology students is a logical approach. The ultimate goal of technology startup is to disrupt the market by bringing new values to a lot of people, and at the same time create new jobs, new markets, and new industries. The issue with business training is students often follow certain business rules, economic theories, finance methodology and develop business plan so all they need is follow the same processes that most large companies are doing to put the products out to the market. But entrepreneurship is not like that because their product is unknown, their customers are unknown, their market is unknown and their business is also unknown. Because there are so many uncertainties, you cannot treat startup like a small company.
Basically, entrepreneurship is not a job; it is a very risky venture. It is not easy but people often glorify its success even there are so many failures that should be taught so students can learn from others’ mistakes. Everyone wants to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and the problem is many entrepreneurship trainings are focusing mostly on the glory but not the defeat. Students are expected to make a lot of money before they are taught about adding value to the market. The purpose of entrepreneurship is not making money but create value products that can change the way people work or make the world a better place. Money is only the result of successfully providing solutions to solve problems.
Because there are so many startup failures, students must be taught about how to deal with failures first. If they are not willing to overcome failure, they never succeed. A major issue for many entrepreneurs, especially in Asia is they do not have an environment where they can exchange ideas and learn from others. It is very difficult to find good advisors. Most Asian entrepreneurs are working by themselves, in isolation, based on their own thinking and creativity. I think university should create an environment for these entrepreneurs to meet and discuss their ideas with each other. Entrepreneur classes should be places in which students spend time with others or experienced entrepreneurs to discuss ideas on how to taking their ideas to the market.
Entrepreneurship is as much about doing as it is about knowing, students should learn by doing rather than memorizing theories about startups. That is why “learning by doing” approach is perfect for this type of learning. To teach entrepreneurship, students will have to fail several times as “learning experience” in class’ exercises so they can build their resiliency and characters. A famous successful entrepreneur has said: “My biggest failures led to my biggest learning experiences and eventually my success.” Instead of teaching about finance, economic and management, entrepreneurship class must teach about psychological costs associated with failure, risk mitigation, and personal development and that is why I believe teaching entrepreneurship in business programs is not effective.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
