I didn’t say that, but I hear it from people and I can’t believe it. It continues to amaze me that I still come across learned folks who think we can’t teach entrepreneurship. On recent occasions I was in the audience for talks where “leading authorities” from top US and UK universities claimed that entrepreneurship could not be taught. They claim that entrepreneurs have certain traits that can’t be learned. Colleagues report hearing the same refrain from the leader of a major philanthropic foundation: a foundation where part of the mission is to support entrepreneurship! Wow.
What I find interesting is that these folks are not saying that we’re not teaching entrepreneurship correctly, they are still saying we can’t teach it. If the issue was the former you might be able to convince me that some universities may not be going about it in the right way. But to say we cannot teach entrepreneurship – I don’t think so! Are some folks more inclined? Perhaps, and they have a head start, but we can teach entrepreneurship to anyone.
The methods we use today have evolved and continue to do so. There is a method at the core but we also experiment both with new insights and new ways of reaching our students. Entrepreneurship educators actually practice what we preach by continuously trying new things in the classroom. We take a small risk on something new; if it works, we continue to use it. If not, we pivot and try something new. Sound familiar?
I think many of the folks who espouse that we can’t teach entrepreneurship are akin to the great ‘natural’ athletes who have hard time in the coaching profession after their playing careers end. It all came so naturally to these folks that they cannot break it down to explain, coach, and teach it to others. So perhaps these folks who say we can’t teach entrepreneurship just can’t see how to teach it because it came so naturally to them when they developed and ran their firms. Maybe.
It has to be something like this because otherwise everyone teaching entrepreneurship in the higher education industry would be perpetrating one of the greatest frauds and conspiracies of all time. The numbers for entrepreneurship education at the higher education level have grown exponentially in the past few decades. Jerry Katz, from St Louis University, has for years compiled the numbers on programs, courses, and universities. Katz reports that in 1970 there were a scant few courses in entrepreneurship but by the year 2000, there were approximately 1,600 schools offering over 2,200 courses.
But it’s not a fraud or conspiracy and we can teach entrepreneurship. Look, I know I’m biased. I’m a professor of entrepreneurship and if I were wrong I’d likely be out of a job. But I’m not. During my time at the Lally School of Management & Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), I witnessed and was a part of teaching students who built successful businesses. Now that I’m at Babson College I do the same but also teach how to be entrepreneurial no matter path you take by teaching about entrepreneurship of all kinds®.
There truly is a method to teaching entrepreneurship but it is substantially different than traditional management teaching most of which evolves from theory focused on large existing firms. Some of the tools are the same but the mindset about what you do is clearly different. I spoke to a friend and colleague Mike Haynie from Syracuse University’s Department of Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises about teaching entrepreneurship and his thoughts parse out this perspective. “Arguably, you can teach anyone 99% of the ‘activities’ related to launching and growing a venture, and we do every day in b-schools everywhere. This is because, at the end of the day, these are fundamental business skills and processes that are not necessarily idiosyncratic to entrepreneurship – other than the context of new firms. So given that, I would argue that I can teach someone to be very skilled in those processes. We can teach someone how to write a great business plan, develop a great marketing strategy, produce financial projections, etc. – thus we can teach the activities that compose that act of ‘entrepreneurship’ – starting and growing a venture.”
But there’s more. Professor Haynie then goes on to illustrate why some schools have changed how they teach entrepreneurship with a focus on bringing action and ‘doing’ into the classroom. “However, a different and more relevant and precise question is can you teach someone to recognize ‘entrepreneurial opportunity’ - the step before entrepreneurial action? This is a question that gets to both cognition and motivation. I’m not convinced that we can do this in a mainstream model of Higher-Ed, but do believe that we can ‘enable’ such learning through experiential pedagogy. In other words, while we can seed such learning in a classroom in this regard – with courses related to understanding motivation, sense-making, and other concepts – we also have to deliver a means for those seeds to be planted such that the teaching someone to be ‘entrepreneurial’ becomes about them teaching and learning on their own and by ‘doing.’
So it’s both about teaching individuals to build ventures but also teaching them to think and act entrepreneurially. And it is being done both at Babson and many others around the world. Most importantly, the old ways of teaching entrepreneurship with war stories of successful entrepreneurs and a mindset and theories taught in a straight line from the practice of large, existing organizations is dying (if not dead everywhere already). This point about the evolution of teaching entrepreneurship leads me to a thought from a good friend and mentor. Here is the perspective of Don Kuratko from Indiana University’s Kelly School.
“People who say we cannot teach entrepreneurship are dangerous people to society. They are the keepers of the old thinking and their beliefs ensure that we cannot advance ourselves. Remember that in the late 1800s it was believed then that medicine could not be taught. It was a trade to be learned “on the job.” How comforting for all those poor souls who died under the knife of incompetent doctors. Look where the medical profession is today thanks to the rise of medical schools and the “new wave” of thinking that medical practice and research could be taught! We are at the same juncture with entrepreneurship. I believe we are washing away the old thinking and revolutionizing business schools (and campuses for that matter) with the “new thinking” that entrepreneurial practice and research can be taught!
So maybe we didn’t always teach it ‘right’ over the first decades of existence and because of that it might have been fair for some to surmise that “you can’t teach entrepreneurship.” Please don’t tell me that today. Colleges and universities today can do it right. Entrepreneurship education has evolved with rigor and scope – there’s a method and it can be applied not just to building new ventures but to all walks of life. We can teach you to be a ‘classic’ entrepreneur or to be entrepreneurial in whatever you decide to do and because of this our world is going to be a much better place!