Can entrepreneurship be taught?

Contributed by BL

Can entrepreneurship be taught? This is the million dollar question which everyone seems to have different answers. Since 1999, there is a huge wave of entrepreneurship education running across many parts of the world. Many governments including ours, have thrown their resources to teach entrepreneurship to young students. One of their aims is to get more younger people to be creative and start their enterprises.

Entrepreneurship is a contact sport . Whatever you do, be it an ivory-towered academic to a secondary student, you have to practice before you preach. It’s not an easy sport because you will tend to failure most of the time. I have my personal muses when educators start to claim that they teach entrepreneurship in order to generate more small-medium enterprises. It’s the same issue with schools teaching creativity. It will be better off for them if they say that they are educating people with tools that are linked to being creative, instead of claiming to teach creativity. Similar in entrepreneurship, the same thing happens.

Instead of writing a content neutral position, I will prefer the challenge of taking one position and defend it. Anyone can disagree with my opinions here. It’s exciting if it can generate some debate. Here are the sum of my views for the issue:

Not everything in Entrepreneurship can be taught.

Most people in this school of thought believe that teaching entrepreneurship is just as oxymoronic as teaching creativity. Some of them believe that an entrepreneur is borne and not made. You cannot teach someone how to be an entrepreneur, because successful entrepreneurs possess traits which defy social conventions. That’s why we know that out of 10 new startups, only 1 survive. Even till today, this rule of thumb seems to hold with the overwhelming emphasis of teaching people to be entrepreneurial.

The entrepreneurs who made it are usually people who bring ideas that are out of the socially acceptable or the business model does not look appealing from first impression. It’s like telling someone in the 14th century that the Earth is round. Entrepreneurs need to do that all the time, by convincing their investors that the earth is round. They will either try to sell you the idea that there is a market for their idea or their method of marketing that will create the need for their product.

Sadly, even as an academic, I will say the same thing that there are just things in entrepreneurship that you can never learn from the textbook. I read books telling me about how to be an entrepreneur. Yet, when I do it, some of the things just do not match the real world. My favourite example is fund raising. Most books advocate fund raising as a process which has to be done continuously to keep the business alive. When I was fundraising, my mentor told me that there is no difference to raise £1K and £100K. You should decide how many rounds of fundraising and just do it in a discrete manner. That will ensure the entrepreneur can get time to do their business. Most start-ups die because of the burden of fundraising. It is human nature not to part with their money even if the venture capitalists and business angels are rich people.

The best part is that when people start to generalizing processes for entrepreneurship, for example, if you are a biotech company, this is the “A to Z” method on setting up structures and processes. I will agree that some of the experience are useful for the entrepreneur. However, the entrepreneur has to be wary about them. He must also be aware whether his business adheres to traditional views in how the industry is run. If you have a business which is suppose to redefine the landscape of the market, it is very likely that the business model for your product is not in existence. You are face with a dilemma. Do you want to come up with a new business model or modify an existing business model to help you to market and sell your product?

What I do think that it can be taught, is simple business finance. A good entrepreneur must have financial prudence and ability to take calculate risk. It is a myth that most entrepreneurs are heavy risk takers. Of course, when I mean financial prudence, it means how to maintain cashflows to run your business and generate revenue. Most traditional family businesses failed because the entrepreneurs don’t know about corporate finance. However, the world is different today compare to the past.

Entrepreneurship as a lifestyle

Some people decided a long time that they don’t want to work for anyone but for themselves. It’s their point of view and I totally respect that. It’s a lifestyle choice in a way to choose to be an entrepreneur. However, learning to be an entrepreneur does not mean that you have to start a business yourself.

Actually, most of the skills that people teach in entrepreneurship courses are basic networking, financial and project management, fund raising and writing a business plan. Honestly, these skills are not catered to entrepreneurs but to people from all walks of life. If you work for a big corporation, you need to network your way and come up with new project proposals to get your promotion. If you are a research scientist, you have to write grant proposals to get money in funding your ressearch. It’s hard to explain what is real life or not.

So, in the end, it is important to decide whether you can subject yourself to a different lifestyle. If you don’t think that you want to take the risk to start up your own company, it is perfectly alright to choose a career which match your needs. Don’t be persuaded by the media in doing what’s cool and fashionable. Do something that you think that you can create and add value to. It is important to know that entrepreneurship is a lifestyle and it is not the only kind of choice that you can make.

Author’s note: It might be more interesting if we hear views from people around whether the subject of entrepreneurship can be taught.

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