Classes for would-be entrepreneurs are a hot trend at America's universities. But can risk taking and originality be learned?

It can be, but it depends on the individual.

But can entrepreneurship really be taught in a classroom? Fierce debate erupted over that question when a few maverick professors first introduced entrepreneurship classes to business schools more than 20 years ago. Now that the courses are a powerful draw at many universities, it is an issue worth revisiting, especially given the rising cost of higher education. According to the College Board, the average tab for completing an MBA adds up to $162,000.

Many acclaimed business builders say success depends as much on temperament as on teaching. "An entrepreneur is a kind of genius who is born, not made," says Ann Winblad, 55, a co-founding partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners in San Francisco.

Entrepreneurship is about having guts -- something professors cannot teach, adds Paul Fleming, 52, who founded P.F. Chang's China Bistro, a Scottsdale-based restaurant chain that brought in $675 million in sales last year. "The steps you have to take, the risks you have to take -- I don't think in a million years you can teach it in a classroom."

Ultimately, building a successful business is about passion, says Doris Christopher, 60, who founded Pampered Chef in Addison, Ill., a direct seller of kitchen tools; she sold it to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway in 2002. "The passion for your business is not something you can learn in a classroom."

Consider three of today's great entrepreneurs: Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. Not one credits the classroom for his success. All are famously and unapologetically dropouts from college.

Education effectivenessAdmittedly, little research has been done on the effectiveness of various types of entrepreneurship education. But intriguing results came from a 2002 study at the University of Arizona.

Researchers found that five years after graduation, the average annual income for entrepreneurship majors and MBAs who concentrated in entrepreneurship at the school was almost $72,000, or 27 percent higher than for other business majors and students with standard MBAs.

Moreover, entrepreneurship graduates were three times more likely to

form new companies. And we're not talking mom-and-pop shops. On average the businesses had annual sales of $50 million and employed 200.

Taking an entrepreneurship class isn't likely to turn a student with no business smarts into an opportunity-spotting, moneymaking genius. Yet plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that the classes can speed the learning curve for those with the right stuff. On the most fundamental level, the programs can teach students basic skills, such as managing financials or writing a business plan, forcing them to impose a structure and deadlines on dreams that they might never achieve otherwise.________________________________________Despite its increasing popularity, there remains a debate about whether entrepreneurship can in fact be taught. Some maintain that entrepreneurship is more about personality traits – you either have what it takes to be successful or you don't.

Wharton Management Professor Raffi Amit and academic director of the Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Program, disagrees with that theory. "It is known, and my research has validated it beyond reasonable doubt, that there is no single set of traits that are absolutely necessary to be a successful entrepreneur. We all have what it takes to be very successful," he says.

Amit maintains that entrepreneurship can be taught by providing students with a balance of rigorous academic courses and hands-on programs in which they can turn their ideas into viable businesses.

"In classes, we teach students tools and techniques to address issues that entrepreneurs need to know like how to evaluate an opportunity to determine if it's right for you, how to finance ventures, and how to compete as a young company. And we teach them the entrepreneurial mindset so they learn to be flexible and to adapt rapidly to new situations and continuously search for new opportunities. We give them the tools that enable them to avoid fatal flaws and traps and better prepare them for the venturing process," he says.

Such tools complement the courses and are offered through such programs as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence Program, the Venture Initiation Program and internships at early-stage companies. Students also can participate in the Wharton Business Plan Competition and other events and conferences throughout the year. "The classroom experience lays the foundation that then gives them the principles to apply in the context of their own ideas," says Amit.

John Lusk, who graduated from Wharton's MBA Program in 1999, and subsequently launched Platinum Concepts with a classmate and wrote the book, "The Mouse Driver Chronicles: An Entrepreneurial Adventure," says that the knowledge he learned in courses was essential. "I still reference my notes from Prof. Leonard Lodish's class on Entrepreneurial Marketing. And one of the first courses I took involved a case study in which the entrepreneur utilized the network of everyone he knew all the way through the supply chain. That showed how your contacts are so important and why you need to utilize them to the hilt, which we absolutely did when we started our business," says Lusk, who is now vice president of marketing at WhitePages Inc.

Tobey, who graduated from Wharton's Undergraduate Program in 2006 with a concentration in entrepreneurship, agrees not only that entrepreneurship can be taught, but that those courses enrich students' overall academic experience.

Now a consultant with Oliver Wyman in Chicago, Tobey says that the practical opportunities like the VIP and EIR program are great opportunities to find mentors who further the learning process. "When you have people like Prof. Gary Dushnitsky or Jeffrey Babin of VIP talk about your ideas and ask questions you wouldn't think of off the bat, it helps guide you through the big idea process and go from theoretical to a vision of what you need to think about on a day to day basis – the entrepreneurial mindset. If you go out there yourself with no direction, it will be much harder and you might need to start two or three businesses before you pick that up."

Second-year MBA student Eurie Kim, who is concentrating in Entrepreneurial Management and is co-president of the Entrepreneurship Club, says that a lot of students are interested in starting their own business at some point, but many see entrepreneurship as a "big black box" that they are afraid to look in, as they are unsure how to take the first step toward an entrepreneurial venture. "These classes are helpful because they walk you through the process in a low-risk environment," she says.

Eurie points to an Innovation class taught by Prof. Karl Ulrich as an example. "He takes students through a framework of brainstorming business ideas and whittling them down to the viable ones. In another class taught by a VC you write a 40-page business plan and talk about the plan with visiting CEOs. And there are classes that walk you through the actual process of getting funding. No one will teach you that in the real world, but here we can learn all of these things."

She adds that even for students not planning to start their own business, the entrepreneurship curriculum is invaluable. "The courses teach students that there are many ways to be an entrepreneur as well as how you can tap into that in other parts of your life," says Kim, a VIP participant. "You can have an entrepreneurial state of mind in a consulting or banking firm based on how you approach problems and think about innovation. Firms that recruit are very excited to see an entrepreneurial spirit and feel that this type of person will make a real impact in their firm."

And for those students who do plan to launch a business, the entrepreneurship curriculum gives them a strong foundation from which to do so, according to Tobey. "In school you learn the tools and entrepreneurial mindset. You don't need to start a business for two years and fail because you have mentors and professors there to help you hone in on that mindset." ---------------------------------------------------------------------But I'm not sure it can always be learned, There are processes to entrepreneurship that institutes teach us, but does that create a prescription for entrepreneurship?

There are millions of variables, and they're too dynamic for us, at least in our present state of understanding, to be able to prescribe success. But can we teach students enough to push up the odds of success? Depends

Again, it depends how we take it from the sources, but my thinking is - with positive attitude, this can be

Entrepreneurship has become big business. Nearly two-thirds of all the colleges and

universities in the U.S. offer formal courses in it, 10 times as many as in the 1970s, when

only 200 institutions had the temerity to think they could teach such a thing. Now business

schools are realizing that even if not everyone wants to be their own boss, people do want to

know the secrets of successful entrepreneurship. So they are looking at a new set of

potential students--"corporate entrepreneurs."

The idea behind the notion of corporate entrepreneurship, or "intrapreneurship," as it's

sometimes called, is that key features of start-up ventures--such as their pursuit of rapid

growth, great flexibility and innovativeness--are just as vital for big corporations.

"Intrapreneurship helps counter the tendency of large companies to become less agile and

effective as their size produces more bureaucracy," says Patrice Houdayer, dean of EM

Lyon, which has become one of Europe's top schools for entrepreneurship. "In times like

these, large organizations need to be as flexible as possible, ready to change and develop

rapidly to accommodate the shifting needs of their customers and of the market as a whole."

EM Lyon has come up with a 10-point checklist of concerns for the budding intrapreneur. "It

covers such basics as thinking and acting as if you were in a small organization, relying on a

single backer who can withdraw their support at just the wrong time, the linkage of personal

reward with success and overidentification with a particular project," Houdayer says.

But how far should schools go in trying to foster entrepreneurial spirit in big businesses? The

idea of mavericks shaking things up has its attractions, but doesn't it also have dangers?

Isn't it mavericks who sparked every major financial blow-up from tulip fever and the South

Sea bubble to the dot-com implosion and the subprime mess?

No it isn't, says Gregg Fairbrothers, at Dartmouth College's Tuck School, in New Hampshire.

You've got to distinguish between entrepreneurs and gamblers. "Gamblers take risks in

search of big payouts, especially under conditions of apparent moral hazard," he says, "and

they are motivated primarily by the idea of big payoffs out of proportion to effort and time

expended. Those are the people who get us into trouble. Entrepreneurs are not risk takers;

they are risk quantifiers and risk reducers."

Fairbrothers also observes that true entrepreneurial behavior means seeking to do new

things, to create something from scratch and to solve problems: "Of course entrepreneurs

like to make money as much as anybody else, but most are motivated more by the

achievement of making something happen than by the reward of quick, easy money. Very

little entrepreneurial money comes easily--just ask a successful entrepreneur."

Houdayer agrees with him but also sees the need for control mechanisms to curb over-

adventurous behavior. "Organizations need to create environments that encourage new

ideas, new approaches and new methodologies but also ones with rigorous checks and

balances," he says. "That's the way to avoid the sorts of problems the financial sector ran

into."

Business schools trying to promote intrapreneurship and free organizations from red tape

and conformity they may face their biggest challenge not with the well-established

businesses of the West but with the new corporations of the developing world. China now

has a number of global corporations that can afford to acquire, say, IBM's ( IBM - news -

people ) computer business or Volvo. Those companies may superficially look like their

Western counterparts, but their internal cultures are radically different. "The majority of

Chinese companies are still driven by a single individual at the top, usually the owner or

appointed CEO," says Ryan Owen, a partner in the Chinese arm of Antal, an international

management recruiter. "The paternalistic nature of so many businesses creates many

benefits, but it can smother the intrapreneurial spirit. Coming up with your own ideas is

simply not encouraged, and many employees come to confuse initiative with disloyalty."

According to Haico Ebbers, a professor at the China Europe Institute at Nyenrode business

school in the Netherlands, this challenge requires working within the system. "Because

Chinese businesses are still at a relatively early stage of development," he says, "there is a

dilemma about how much freedom they can safely give their managers and professionals. It

would be important to build safety measures into the system, because these aren't people

who are used to admitting when something isn't working or is going wrong, and they're not

used to strategic thinking. There is still a common belief that you can deal with a problem

when it arises rather than trying to prevent it from happening in the first place."

Richard Goossen wears many hats. Over the past 20 years, Goossen, a lawyer, businessman, and academic, has founded startups, acted as strategic adviser to high-growth companies, written three books, and spoken extensively on the subject of entrepreneurship. Now the CEO of M&A Capital Corp. and a professor of entrepreneurship at Trinity Western University in Vancouver, B.C., Goossen recently decided to tackle the question:Can entrepreneurship be taught? (Businessweek.com, 10/30/06)

"If I go into any social setting, people always wonder how can you teach entrepreneurship," says Goossen. So he decided to explore the topic further. He rounded up a group of entrepreneurship experts ranging from Peter Drucker (Businessweek.com, 11/28/05) to Rita Gunther McGrath to Karl Vesper. He culled their insights, broke them down, and published the results in his most recent book, Entrepreneurial Excellence: Profit From the Best Ideas of the Experts (Career Press; 2007). "My motivation was to talk to the top researchers and instructors in the world who teach something that a lot of people think can't be taught," he says.

Goossen came to the conclusion that while there are several elements that can be taught to enhance the knowledge and success of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship is something one can learn only by doing. "With law or accounting,you can teach a set of principles that a student can master to become a competent practitioner," he says. "But teaching entrepreneurship is tough. In a class it's hard to predict who will do well and who will not."

As a result of his research, Goossen has come up with three entrepreneurial elements that can be taught. The first is general business knowledge—what he calls "the nuts and bolts of management principles and strategic thinking." Next, there are general entrepreneurial principles. "You can lean from what other people have done and where they made

mistakes," he says. Finally, he says one can learn to be alert to opportunities in certain fields in a general sense.

What can't be taught, on the other hand, is what Goossen calls "venture specific opportunity principles." By that he means the ability to understand and see specific niches in a market and recognize whether it will be successful or not. "You can't teach someone how to know what will work and what won't," says Goossen. "You can't even duplicate the set of dynamics of a past success."

In 1970, a national survey of business schools found just 16 courses offered in

entrepreneurship. Since then, entrepreneurial education has taken off like the Internet craze.

Karl Vesper, University of Washington management professor and entrepreneurship expert,

did the groundbreaking 1970 study that, when repeated in 1997, uncovered more than 400

schools offering at least one course in entrepreneurship, and more than 50 schools with four

or more courses.

"Money, mostly" is the reason so many schools have added entrepreneurship to their

offerings, says Vesper, who explains that colleges want to tap into donations from wealthy

alumni. But the visibility of entrepreneurs in business in the past three decades has also

played a role. As headlines blared about the innovation and personal wealth that went hand-

in-hand with entrepreneurs and start-up ventures, especially in the technology sector, the

public became increasingly fascinated with start-up businesses and the risk-taking mind-set

that defines the entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurial education arguably started at Harvard University in 1947 with a single

course. In the mid-1980s, entrepreneurship came into its own, and programs sprang up

offering entrepreneurship tracks and even majors for MBA and undergraduate students. By

the turn of the millennium, students could major or minor in entrepreneurship--even get a

doctorate and join the professors researching and teaching entrepreneurial management

and finance. Along with entrepreneurial degree programs, schools hold student business

plan competitions, sponsor research centers and host venture capital forums. Today, more

than three dozen academic research journals are dedicated to topics ranging from family

businesses, franchising and women entrepreneurs to corporate venturing, incubators and

inner-city business development.

The business students who filled the multiplying classrooms weren't all planning to start

businesses of their own. Some just wanted to pad their resumes with courses that would

convince potential employers they possess the entrepreneurial mind-set. But many, like

Iraklis Grous, a 19-year-old sophomore at Babson College in Babson Park, Massachusetts,

specifically wanted to learn how to become entrepreneurs.

Grous chose Babson College in particular because of a required freshman course giving a

team of 30 students $3,000 to start a business. His team's venture, an inflatable-furniture

marketing business called AirChairs, generated $1,000 in profits and confirmed Grous'

desire to be an entrepreneur. The instruction and environment at Babson "definitely" has

whetted his entrepreneurial instincts and understanding, Grous says. In fact, he's already

incorporated his first start-up, an adventure travel agency called Sirius Trekking, which he

hopes will begin operations this summer. After graduation in 2005, he says, "if the profits

from Sirius go well, I'd love to start another company."

Despite the enthusiasm of students like Grous, skeptics still ask: Can entrepreneurship be

taught? "It can be taught," asserts Stephen Spinelli, director of Babson's Arthur M. Blank

Center for Entrepreneurship. "But I'm not sure it can always be learned. There are processes

to entrepreneurship that we teach, but does that create a prescription for entrepreneurship?

No. There are millions of variables, and they're too dynamic for us, at least in our present

state of understanding, to be able to prescribe success. But can we teach students enough

to push up the odds of success? I think so."

Well-chosen extracurricular activities can push those odds up still further, argues Alvin

Rohrs, CEO of Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), a Springfield, Missouri, organization that

has enlisted business students at more than 1,400 schools around the globe to teach

members of their local communities to start businesses. "It works on two levels," says Rohrs.

"One of our premises is that if you're asked to teach something, you're going to learn it

better." Student teachers learn organization, teambuilding, communication and leadership.

And the informal entrepreneurship students in the communities also benefit. "SIFE teams in

Ghana and Mexico [have taken] entire villages and turned them from subsistence farmers

into business owners," explains Rohrs.

Entrepreneurship is one of the most important aspects of our economy and students understand that. They no longer believe they can take a job with a large corporation and expect that they will spend their careers in one place. Students know they have to build a wide range of interdisciplinary skills that give them maximum flexibility and preparation for the future. Entrepreneurship is one such skill. Whether considering starting an enterprise or just wanting to be an outstanding employee, students want to learn how to recognize opportunity, harness the resources to exploit that opportunity, exercise their creativity, create sustainable solutions, take the inherent risks, and participate in the rewards. Schools are trying to meet this student demand.

Since entrepreneurship is relatively new to higher education, it has yet to become a legitimate academic field of study. In fact, we are frequently asked: Can entrepreneurship even be taught? Entrepreneurs have long been seen as self-taught, self-made individualists. The perception dates from the days of men like Carnegie, Edison, and others, who had little formal schooling. However, the great entrepreneurs of the past did

not really learn or do it all themselves. In the early industrial cities-which were adventurous places, teeming with entrepreneurial activity in then-new fields like telegraphy and railroading-entrepreneurs had access to informal communities of teachers and learners. There they were able to tap into rich networks of contacts for the additional skills and resources their own new ventures needed.

Today, the learning communities and networks are mostly found in and around college campuses. The modern American campus is anything but an ivory tower. It is the crossroads of civilization; just as young people from all points once converged on the great cities to learn and shape their destinies, today they go to college. The campus is where all fields can intersect and cross-pollinate- mathematics and medicine, philosophy and public policy, engineering and the arts -and where all sectors of the real-world economy are represented. Private firms and investors, government agencies, and nonprofits all come to campus to sponsor research, to breed and recruit talent, to search for new ideas. It is no coincidence that the regions flourishing with entrepreneurial activity today tend to grow up around universities: that is where the high-impact entrepreneurs of tomorrow are.

Is Entrepreneurship "Scientific"?

Does entrepreneurship deserve to be a legitimate part of the interdisciplinary nature of a modern university education? Can it be taught? We think yes. Many people once thought that management-a related field-could not be taught. It was largely seen as a personal knack or a set of elusive, intangible skills. But as firms grew too large and complex for seat-of-the-pants managing, there was a need to make the practice more "scientific" and learnable. Today, management is taught everywhere.

Only in recent times have we begun to see entrepreneurship as a field of study in its own right. Since the 1970s, the nation's growth has again become reliant on waves of new ventures in emerging industries. This has made it manifestly clear that conceiving and starting an enterprise-taking the germ of an idea and turning it into an ongoing concern-is not the same as managing what already exists and that, likewise, the practice needs to be made more understandable and available to students regardless of discipline.

Despite the success stories of Bill Gates and Michael Dell, who started college but dropped out to start their companies, many people start companies and fail or have great ideas that are unrealized due to lack of knowledge. Peter Drucker put it bluntly: "Entrepreneurship is 'risky' mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing. They lack the methodology," he wrote in his 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship. That book was an early attempt to codify basic principles. Since then, entrepreneurship education has taken off.

The State of the Art

More than 2,000 college and universities in the United States, about two-thirds of the total, now offer a course in entrepreneurship. A smaller but growing number have entire

sequences leading to an undergraduate minor, a master's in entrepreneurship, or something similar. Entrepreneurship "centers," with outreach activities led by seasoned entrepreneurs serving as coaches, are proliferating.

The Kauffman Foundation has helped to fuel much of this growth. For instance, grants to Stanford University in the 1990s helped launch the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and the Educator's Corner, a modest name for a technology-based program that aggregates and offers resources for those teaching entrepreneurship to engineering, science, and technology students. This material is available to any educator via the Web and contains course syllabi, case studies, and videos of noted entrepreneurs such as Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. More than 1,000 diverse grants to other institutions have funded internships, development of specific courses, dissertations, faculty development seminars, consortium of educators and center directors, and the like.

In short, entrepreneurship education on campuses is vibrant, popular, and useful, but hovering at an emergent stage. The Kauffman Foundation has, therefore, shifted its strategy in this area. Rather than cast a multitude of relatively small grants far and wide to seed the effort, we are now focused on looking at a university as a whole-engaging with an institution in a campus-wide, cross-disciplinary approach to entrepreneurship. We are now funding schools that-as institutions-want to provide an interdisciplinary education in entrepreneurship. Presidents, chancellors, provosts, deans of various disciplines, professors, and center directors are committed to work together to provide all students with access to entrepreneurship courses, most often taught in combination with other subjects.

We started on this new path in late 2003, when we awarded $25 million in grants to eight colleges and universities-now referred to as the Kauffman Campuses-to help them move entrepreneurship education across campus, outside of the business or engineering school. Less than two years into the program, the Kauffman Campuses already have made substantial progress in cultivating a more entrepreneurial environment at their schools-one in which students of all academic disciplines can learn and experience the benefits of an entrepreneurial mind-set.

Facing the Challenges 

Despite these gains, entrepreneurship still lives mostly on the fringes of academe, not in the mainstream. Many in the academic world itself still view entrepreneurship as not quite a legitimate, full-fledged field of study.

It is natural that, as a new field emerges on campus, it takes time to find its rightful place and often shifts along the way. A recent Kauffman Foundation-sponsored survey found that the names and key concepts of entrepreneurship courses vary widely from school to school. And though most programs have some basic features in common, there is so much variation it is hard to identify a typical curriculum, let alone an exemplary one. While diversity is good, this field needs more of the consistency found in others. For instance, we can agree that engineering students must have Calculus I and II or English

students must have Shakespeare. In those fields there is also a firm sense of what the courses should look like.

We have barely scratched the surface in learning to teach entrepreneurship in fields other than business and engineering. Just as most schools of fine arts now teach arts management, we want students to learn how best to start a new theater company or arts center. Education majors ought to be able to learn how best to start a new magnet or charter school-and so on through the humanities, the social sciences, and the various professional schools.

Moreover, beneath the gaps there is a conundrum. To develop good curricula in all these areas, we need more faculty who research entrepreneurship to understand how it works. This research is typically done or led by qualified Ph.D.-holding faculty, of whom there are still few in entrepreneurship. Most faculty are either adjuncts (having practical-life experience but not the academic standing required), or they are "crossovers" from other disciplines (having the standing and the research skills, but little familiarity with entrepreneurship).

A New Strategy

Curriculum has to be made deeper, sounder, and more consistent across the board. So instead of supporting "one-off" curriculum projects at various institutions, we are now focused on piloting and replicating true world-class coursework. For instance, we will be partnering with schools to develop and disseminate an entire new learning sequence for students. To fill a key gap in the curriculum, we are looking at refining and disseminating a very promising new approach to teaching opportunity recognition. And to spread entrepreneurship across the campus, we will help propagate some of the best new curriculum developed at the Kauffman Campuses.

Faculty development is a crucial, related issue. Many schools do not have enough qualified faculty to meet the growing student demand. We are thus intensifying efforts to recruit faculty from all disciplines-be it business, the social sciences, or any other discipline-and prepare them to teach and do research in entrepreneurship.

One way we will do this is by seeding and supporting networks of like-minded faculty across the United States. There are few such mechanisms at present, and they are needed so that entrepreneurship educators can learn from one another and work together to raise the bar for all. We are also looking at novel ideas. Faculty of exceptional promise, for instance, might soon be competing for Kauffman-sponsored sabbaticals: a new kind that would give them time off to study entrepreneurship, develop a course, or lay plans for an academic journal-plus follow-up support to then implement and disseminate what they have learned and done.

As curriculum and faculty grow stronger, we need to assure that entrepreneurship gains full academic status in higher education. All efforts require enlisting partners and champions. Kauffman is working at this from every angle, not only among faculty, but

with university presidents and chancellors. We are also working "from the outside in" with successful entrepreneurs and other champions in the private sector. Many have been very generous thus far, in matters such as creating endowed chairs and professorships in entrepreneurial studies. The key is to lift this groundswell to a new level: we have been working with others, for instance, to form a national panel on entrepreneurship education that might, among other things, take the lead on defining the curriculum for entrepreneurship in higher education.

Our ultimate goal is to see that any young person who enters college, in any field of study, has the chance for a great education in entrepreneurship. Of course not everyone will aspire to be an entrepreneur. But we believe that everyone should at least be acquainted with the role entrepreneurship plays in the economy, aware of the possibility of entrepreneurship as a choice at some point in their careers, and know how to engage with the process. The world in our time-the world these young people will go into-is never static; it is always being re-invented.

And that is precisely what entrepreneurship is about. It is a means of re-inventing the world.

Nature or nurture?

Do entrepreneurs really need a business-school education?

Oct 6th 2009

Richard Branson: what could have been?Rex Features

AMONG the thousands of business schools now operating around the world you would

be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t believe it can teach the skills of

entrepreneurship. However, of the people who immediately spring to mind when one

thinks of entrepreneurs—Bill Gates, Richard Branson or Oprah Winfrey, for example—

few have done more than deliver a speech at a business school. Indeed, a recent

study by King’s College in London has suggested what many intuitively suspect: that

entrepreneurship may actually be in the blood—more to do with genes than

classroom experience. All of which invites the question—does an entrepreneur really

need a business-school education?

Not surprisingly some of the best-known schools in the field have a ready answer to

this: they don’t actually profess to create entrepreneurs, rather they nurture innate

ability. Or as Timothy Faley of the entrepreneurial institute at Michigan’s Ross School

of Business puts it: “A good idea is not enough. You need to know how to transform a

good idea into a good business.”

Schools do this in a number of ways. One is to ensure that faculty are a mix of classic

academics and businesspeople with experience of setting up their own successful

firms. They can also create “incubators” where students nurture ideas and rub

shoulders on a day-to-day basis with the external business world, receiving both

advice and hard cash in the form of investment.

Arguably such help is now more important than ever. The modern entrepreneur is

faced with a more complex world than when Richard Branson began by selling

records out of a phone box. According to Patrice Houdayer, head of one of Europe’s

best-known entrepreneurship schools, EMLYON in France, new businesses used to

move through a distinct series of growth steps—what he terms garage, local, national

and international. Now however, thanks to the communications revolution, they can

leapfrog these stages and go global more or less straightaway—encountering a whole

new set of problems and challenges. In this context Professor Houdayer maintains

that the increasingly diverse nature of MBA classes can help the nascent

entrepreneur in three ways: by plugging them into an international network of

contacts and advisors, by preparing them for the pitfalls and opportunities associated

with dealing across different cultures and by exposing them to the different ways

that business is conducted around the globe.

Better in than out?

Of course entrepreneurship, at least according to the business schools, has moved on

in more than just its international aspect. The thinking now is that entrepreneurship

is no longer just the province of the small, growing company, but should be applied

and practised in organisations of every size. And, because every concept must have

a name, this idea of the big company entrepreneur now has its own designation—

intrapreneurship.

At first sight intrapreneurship looks like an excellent idea. Too many large

organisations ossify once they reach a certain size and the creative spark that made

them successful in the first place can all too easily be stifled by bureaucracy,

conformity and an unwillingness to take risks. What better way to tackle this than to

throw a few mavericks with fire and ambition into the corporate mix? Except, some

decry, haven’t we just seen the results of letting mavericks have their own way at the

levers of power? Creating such radically bright ideas as the sub-prime mortgage, for

example, and playing fast and loose with the basic rules of risk management, and

consequently plunging us into the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

An interesting point say the schools, but for Veronique Bouchard, who teaches on the

Global Entrepreneurship Programme at EMLYON, there’s a big difference between an

entrepreneur and a “mad trader”. She argues that what is being advocated is not

giving free rein to any reckless notion, but harnessing the innovative resources that

will be present in every thriving business. That means creating an environment which

encourages new ideas and approaches, but which also builds in checks and balances.

By doing this an organisation will avoid the sort of anarchy that resulted in the last

stages of the banking boom years. And it will also eliminate the “spend because it’s

there” attitude that develops when individuals are afraid of abandoning redundant

projects because they fear they will not be able to access funding again. The

corollary of all this is that to be truly effective, schools should not just be educating

intrapreneurs themselves. Perhaps even more importantly they also need to be

educating the businesses which host them.