ANTHONY IVES

ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION AS A NEW

MODEL FOR LEADERSHIP EDUCATION

IntroductionEntrepreneurship and leadership are linked in very im-portant ways. When Allen and Roberts (this issue) pro-pose, “The conversations and the needs for leadershiphave both shifted and it is now incumbent on those whovalue leadership most to agree to unifying perspectivesthat can draw us together in common purpose,” they essentially identify the origin of entrepreneurship-common purpose inspired or personified by individualsor groups who seek to make a difference. Whether forprofit or not for profit, entrepreneurship is an expres-sion of efficacy in change being possible.

Especially among college students and recent collegegraduates, leadership is increasingly being carried outin the form of entrepreneurship. There is a growing in-terest among young people in being entrepreneurialleaders who affect change in the marketplace, commu-nities, and society through creating new for-profit andnonprofit entrepreneurial ventures instead of serving asmore traditional leaders who work to affect change fromwithin existing organizations. To grab the attention ofand have an impact on the current and rising genera-tion of college students, leadership educators need todo three things:

1. Respond to this growing interest in entrepreneurshipand provide leadership education that focuses on howto be an entrepreneurial leader.

2. Carry out research to better understand what triggerssomeone to exert entrepreneurial leadership and start anew for-profit or nonprofit entrepreneurial venture.

3. Leverage what can be learned from best practices in entre-preneurship education to improve leadership education.

One of the most thought-provoking, radical, and im-pactful things I learned as a student at MassachusettsInstitute of Technology (MIT) in the mid-1990s wasnot about quantum physics or human genome se-quencing. It was that anyone could be a leader at anytime regardless of title, position, authority, or officialresponsibility. I learned this life-changing lesson as aparticipant in MIT’s first LeaderShape program, whereI spent an incredible 5 days unlearning what I thoughtleadership was and then relearning what leadershipreally is. My previously held beliefs that only the presi-dents of companies or captains of teams were leaderswere replaced by more useful beliefs that anyone couldserve as a leader by creating a vision for change andworking with and through others to realize this vision.

However, I still viewed leadership as being carried outonly within an existing organization, whether it be a com-munity agency, company, charity, or student club. Andthe more I talked to my peers about leadership, I realizedthat most, perhaps all, of us still constructed leadership ina similar fashion. We were motivated to use our knowl-edge, skills, contacts, and resources to affect positivechanges in society through joining leading high-techcompanies, Wall Street banks, government agencies, andnonprofits and looking for immediate opportunities toexert leadership within these organizations.

The economic and career landscape dramaticallyshifted for my generation and society in general withthe development of the first World Wide Web browser

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and the explosive creation and growth of Internet start-up companies in the late 1990s. It became increasinglyeasy and appealing for a few young people with onlysome computers and computer programming knowl-edge to develop an idea for a new Internet company,raise funding from investors, and launch the company.There was a wild proliferation of young Internet en-trepreneurs whose missions were not only to generateprofits but to radically change and improve the funda-mental ways that markets and industries functioned tomake them more open, efficient, and customer focused.No longer would young people have to join a large or-ganization and wait to find opportunities to affect thekinds of changes they desired as leaders. More easilythan ever before, they could exert leadership in a newway-through entrepreneurship, the pursuit of oppor-tunity beyond the tangible resources currently con-trolled (Stevenson, 1983).

We all know now that this burst of entrepreneurialenergy in the late 1990s turned into an economic bub-ble that later resulted in the collapse and bankruptcyof many companies, losses of billions of dollars by in-vestors, and high levels of unemployment. However,what is less known and discussed is how this burst ofentrepreneurial energy had a significant impact on thecareer and self-identity mind-sets of the next genera-tion of entrepreneurial leaders. These men and womencreate visionary scenarios and use these visions to re-cruit and mobilize a supporting cast of participants whocommit to and enact the vision to achieve strategicvalue creation (Gupta, MacMillan, & Surie, 2004). Bybeing involved in start-up companies, hearing manystories about young entrepreneurs, and heeding publicsector calls to increase the level of entrepreneurship toencourage economic growth and transform society, anew even larger wave of young aspiring entrepreneursemerged in America and around the world.

Examples of young people seizing opportunities tobe societal leaders and change agents as entrepreneursare everywhere these days. Perhaps the most visible ex-ample is Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebookwhile he was a 19-year-old student at Harvard Univer-sity. Although Facebook has had incredible commer-cial success with an estimated current value of around$50 billion dollars, Zuckerberg has repeatedly said thathis mission has not been to make money, but instead

making the flow of information open between people.For his entrepreneurial leadership and impact on theworld, Time magazine named him its person of the yearin 2010. As a sign of Facebook’s increasing impact onthe world, this year Facebook has been heavily men-tioned in the media as playing a key role in connect-ing people who were key in inspiring and organizingthe protests and revolutions that took place in theMiddle East.

Other young entrepreneurial leaders have had greatimpact on society through engaging in social entrepre-neurship as a way to affect change. Dees (2001) de-scribes social entrepreneurs as those who “play the roleof change agents in the social sector, by:

• Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value(not just private value),

• Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportuni-ties to serve that mission,

• Engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adap-tation, and learning,

• Acting boldly without being limited by resources cur-rently in hand, and

• Exhibiting heightened accountability to the constituen-cies served and for the outcomes created” (p. 4)

The two recent examples of young entrepreneurialleaders who have impacted society through social en-trepreneurship that follow are known around the world.Wendy Kopp proposed the idea for Teach for Americaas her undergraduate thesis at Princeton University andthen went on to found the organization after she grad-uated. Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley started Kiva,a leading online microlending nonprofit organization,after hearing a talk at Stanford University by NobelPrize winner Muhammad Yunus about the role of mi-crofinance in improving the lives of poor people inBangladesh.

Higher education institutions have responded to thisgrowing interest in entrepreneurship by significantly in-creasing the education and support for entrepreneur-ship. A 2008 report by the Kauffman Panel onEntrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Educationnoted that “in the past three decades, formal programs(majors, minors and certificates) in entrepreneurshiphave more than quadrupled, from 104 in 1975 to more

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than 500 in 2006” (p. 6). In addition to formal pro-grams, many higher education institutions now offer avariety of informal entrepreneurship programs such asbusiness plan competitions, entrepreneurship speakerseries, and entrepreneurship clubs. There is also an enor-mous amount of entrepreneurship resources availableon the Internet, with web sites such as the KauffmanFoundation and Stanford Technology Ventures Programproviding educational videos, business plan writing tem-plates, and other helpful tools.

Despite this increase of educational opportunities andresources dedicated to entrepreneurship, a significantgap still exists in the provision of entrepreneurship ed-ucation. Most entrepreneurship education and supportis relevant and useful only for aspiring entrepreneurialleaders who have already decided that they want to starta new entrepreneurial venture. Typical entrepreneur-ship classes include topics such as how to write a busi-ness plan, how to raise investments, entrepreneurialmarketing, and specialized classes in particular fieldssuch as high-technology entrepreneurship, social entre-preneurship, biotech entrepreneurship, or internationalentrepreneurship. These classes help students have a bet-ter chance of success if they decide to create a new en-trepreneurial venture. However, these classes often dolittle to encourage students to create a new entrepre-neurial venture if students have not already decided todo so. Putting the proverbial cart before the horse, itseems as if entrepreneurship educators have failed torecognize the need to first help someone decide to dosomething before helping them learn how to do it suc-cessfully. There is a lack of entrepreneurship educationfocused on inspiring students to undertake entrepre-neurial leadership, helping them identify and considerdifferent entrepreneurial leadership opportunities, andproviding them experiential opportunities to developthe confidence and competencies necessary to be suc-cessful in creating a new entrepreneurial venture as away of affecting change.

After working in the entrepreneurship education fieldin the United States, Europe, and Asia for the past sev-eral years, collaborating with and learning from manyexperts in the field, and reading leading books and jour-nals related to entrepreneurship education, it has be-come apparent that we lack a sufficient understandingof what triggers someone to start a new entrepreneurial

venture. It is not surprising that entrepreneurship edu-cation currently does not do enough to help studentsget to the point of deciding to start a new entrepre-neurial venture; one cannot teach what one does notknow. For entrepreneurship education to become moreeffective and thus for leadership education to drawmore from entrepreneurship education and also be-come more effective, more research needs to be doneto better understand what triggers someone to under-take entrepreneurial leadership and create a new entre-preneurial venture. If we want to help develop an evenlarger and more powerful new generation of entrepre-neurial leaders, then we need to know what can be doneto encourage more young people to take entrepreneur-ial action and create new entrepreneurial ventures thatimprove the marketplace, communities, and society.

Following are a few “knowns” regarding (a) what trig-gers someone to exert entrepreneurial leadership andstart a new entrepreneurial venture and (b) the emerg-ing research field of entrepreneurial cognition that aimsto better understand the triggering question as well asother important questions related of the people side ofentrepreneurship.

• Entrepreneurial cognitions have been defined as “theknowledge structures that people use to make assess-ments, judgments or decisions involving opportunityevaluation and venture creation and growth” (Mitchell etal., 2002, p. 97).

• Krueger (2007) has suggested that “behind entrepreneur-ial action are entrepreneurial intentions; behind entre-preneurial intentions are known entrepreneurial attitudes;behind entrepreneurial attitudes are deep cognitive struc-tures; and behind deep cognitive structures are deep be-liefs” (p. 124). Better understanding how and whereentrepreneurial beliefs are generated can thus help educa-tors to replicate and instill expert entrepreneurial beliefs,cognitive structures, and attitudes in students. This in turnwill hopefully lead to an increase in entrepreneurial in-tentions and ultimately entrepreneurial action.

• Urban (2010) has summarized the previous work ofother experts in the field of entrepreneurial cognitionand stated that making an entrepreneurial decision, suchas the decision to start a new entrepreneurial venture, isthe result of both motivation and cognitions such as in-tellect, skills, and ability.

In other words, to encourage more young people toengage in entrepreneurial leadership, we need to betterunderstand the beliefs, motivations, attitudes, and cog-nitive structures that drive someone to start a new en-trepreneurial venture and how to impact them througheducation. A good starting point would be to exploreand test current entrepreneurship education pedagogiesfor their impact on deep belief structures and entrepre-neurial expertise (Krueger, 2007).

There are several highly regarded examples of effectiveentrepreneurship education that could be researched toevaluate the impact of different pedagogies on changingsomeone’s entrepreneurial beliefs and expertise. Stan-ford University’s Technology Venture Program and In-stitute of Design offer interactive and experientialcourses and activities that engage students in becomingaware of, challenging, and reworking their own as-sumptions about what entrepreneurship is, what itmeans to be entrepreneurial, and how to be a successfulentrepreneur. MIT’s Developmental Lab has raised in-terest among students and trained them in starting en-trepreneurial ventures based on appropriate technologiesand sustainable solutions to address economic, envi-ronmental, educational, and other challenges in the de-veloping world. These and many other successfulentrepreneurship education programs offer possible bestpractices for leadership educators to learn from and in-corporate into their pedagogies, as appropriate.

ConclusionLeadership educators have an opportunity to make a greatimpact on young people by leveraging the growing in-terest in entrepreneurship and providing leadership ed-ucation that focuses on entrepreneurial leadership. Thereis much that can be learned from entrepreneurship edu-cation that can help leadership educators be more effectiveand capture the attention of more students. Leadershipeducators can also make a significant contribution to the

fields of entrepreneurship education and leadership edu-cation by helping to answer the question of what triggerssomeone to undertake entrepreneurial leadership and cre-ate a new for-profit or nonprofit organization as a wayof affecting change.

ReferencesDees, J. G. (2001). The meaning of “social entrepreneurship.”Retrieved from www.caseatduke.org/documents/dees_sedef.pdf onApril 24, 2011.

Gupta, V., MacMillan, I. C., & Surie, G. (2004). Entrepreneurialleadership: Developing and measuring a cross-cultural construct.Journal of Business Venturing, 19, 241–260.

Kauffman Panel on Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Edu-cation. (2008). Entrepreneurship in American Higher Education.Kansas City, MO: Kauffman Foundation.

Krueger, N. F. (2007). What lies beneath? The experiential essenceof entrepreneurial thinking. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice,31(1), 123–138.

Mitchell, R. K., Busenitz, L., Lant, T., McDougall, P. P., Morse, E.A., & Smith, B. (2002). Toward a theory of entrepreneurial cogni-tion: Rethinking the people side of entrepreneurship research. Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, 27(2), 93–104.

Stevenson, H. H. (1983). A perspective on entrepreneurship. HarvardBusiness School Working Paper No. 9-384-131. Boston, MA: Har-vard Business School.

Urban, B. (2010). Cognitions and motivations for new venture cre-ation decisions: linking expert scripts to self-efficacy, a South Africanstudy. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 2(9),1512–1530.

Anthony Ives is an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship educa-tor, and consultant currently living in Taiwan where he ishelping to create a more vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystemthrough developing an international entrepreneurship huband advising entrepreneurs and startup teams. He is pur-suing a Ph.D. in Entrepreneurial Psychology through Ab-erdeen Business School, Robert Gordon University (UK).

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