Entrepreneurship education
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Entrepreneurship education seeks to provide students with the knowledge, skills and motivation to encourage entrepreneurial success in a variety of settings. Variations of entrepreneurship education are offered at all levels of schooling from K-12 schools through graduate university programs. Over the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, there has been a convergence of entrepreneur and educational styles at every level.
What makes entrepreneurship education distinctive is its focus on realization of opportunity, where management education is focused on the best way to operate existing hierarchies. Both approaches share an interest in achieving "profit" in some form (which in non-profit organizations or government can take the form of increased services or decreased cost or increased responsiveness to the customer/citizen/client).
Opportunities can be realized in several ways. The most popular one is through opening a new organization (e.g starting a new business), and this approach is best discussed by William Gartner of Clemson University. Another approach is to promote innovation or introduce new products or services or markets in existing firms. This approach is called corporate entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship, and was made popular by author Gifford Pinchot in his book of the same name. A recent approach involves creating charitable organizations (or portions of existing charities) which are designed to be self-supporting in addition to doing their good works. This is usually called social entrepreneurship or social venturing, and one of its pioneers is Greg Dees of Duke University. Even a version of public sector entrepreneurship has come into being in governments, with an increased focus on innovation and customer service. This approach got its start in the policies of the UK's Margaret Thatcher and the USA's Ronald Reagan.
Regardless of the setting, the enduring (or perhaps unkillable) question is "Can entrepreneurship be taught?" The answer is "yes, but". There are people who are born with innate skills and understanding that equip them with nearly everything they need to get started as entrepreneurs, recognize what is good in their works, and fix those elements in which they are weak. Kemmons Wilson, the legendary founder of Holiday Inns, was an example, although Bill Gates of Microsoft or Pierre Omidyar of eBay are often mentioned these days. For such people, entrepreneurship education is not needed, and sometimes the resulting fights between a natural entrepreneur's intuitive sense of what is the "right way" to do something and the academic approach can result in stunting the entrepreneurial spirit.
But a Kemmons Wilson or Bill Gates is rare among the 23 million self-employeds in the USA (as of 2003). For the vast majority of entrepreneurs-to-be (say 99.99%), the advantage of education is that it decreases the chances of failure, by teaching the basic business functions, the best practice approaches, the skills of dealing with customers and finances, and the social networking side of business. Can this approach make a regular person into a visionary like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs? No, but it can make them highly successful, and in reality even the visionaries need someone to handle the business realities. For example, Gates depended on Steve Ballmer (a Harvard graduate in Economics and Math) to handle the day-to-day operations of Microsoft, and Pierre Omidyar of eBay depended on Stanford MBA and BSEE Jeff Skoll to keep the place going while Omidyar built the original vision. Seeing the wisdom of this approach, most entrepreneurship programs use a mix of regular full-time faculty and part-time adjunct faculty (often successful current or former entrepreneurs) to teach and support each other in the classroom and in the larger entrepreneurship program. The adjuncts lend the real-world stories, expectations and heuristics (a fancy academic term for "rules of thumb") while the academics tie these together with the methods, skills and theories the students have learned in their other classes. The result is an approach which makes entrepreneurship into a professional activity.
The 1990s saw the growth of entrepreneurship as a profession within business, and in that professional approach lies the secret benefit of entrepreneurship education - it helps decrease the chances of failure by stressing a consistent and proven set of practices. That idea of professionalizing the process of entrepreneurship is the other great commonality across all of modern entrepreneurship education. Whether it is Treps [1], the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship [2] or members of the Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education [3] working with grade school and high school kids in the USA, or undergraduate or MBA programs like those at Saint Louis University [4], Babson College [5] or any of the over 200 schools with majors eWeb's list of colleges with majors, there are formal entrepreneurship education programs turning out tens of thousands of prepared, motivated and connected student entrepreneurs each year. With entrepreneurship education, they know more, others (like bankers, investors, corpoate customers, etc.) know what these student entrepreneurs are likely to know, and the entrepreneurs', their firms, and our economy are better off for their taking the time to learn how to do it right.
Networking a new generation of entrepreneurs into the twenty-first century through use of the internet is creating a global resource and a new wave of international coordination. A coordination offering business opportunities worldwide and proliferating the networking of international business interests. Bright young innovator’s working together are key to future competition and international economic growth. Young entrepreneurs contributing to global stability by expanding market connections offering a more progressive international connectivity that, over-time, will improve global stability. The networking of new business opportunities through resources such as "Young Entrepreneurs International" offering youth business opportunity to expand horizons and work together, combining the interests of the international community, China and the United States coordinating Programs such as DECA assisting young business innovators like Devon Ridley who at sixteen-years-old began doing international networking through his http://www.youngentrepreneursinternational.com] linking business profiles with business needs. The application of simple global networking encouraging free-trade and improving connectivity. Resources changing the face of international relations and the nature of doing business.
Some of the best resources for Entrepreneurship education can be found outside of traditional academic settings and materials. Examples of resources available on the Web include:
- Venture Blog is a popular blog focused on financing and board level management of high technology ventures.
- Now Whatis focused on managing the expansion phase of high technology ventures with good coverage of operational issues.
- Devon Ridley offering global networking of business, entrepreneur and student resources.
- Jim Collins provides excellent insights for entrepreneurs, that are applicable to a wide range of different sized companies.
