Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?
Making a Choice
The explosion of entrepreneurial instruction has unquestionably
made the selection of a school tougher for students struggling to
become entrepreneurs through education. The basic question
they're asking is: "Who's got the best program for
me?" Students overwhelmingly state that they start the selection
process by looking at two key criteria. First, they want to enroll
in a college or university that has a great reputation. Once they
know which level of schools they can get into, then they want an
entrepreneurship program that meets their specific interests. At
the first stage of the screening process, a school's reputation
is either national or regional--and entrepreneurship programs
typically fall into one of three categories: Comprehensive
programs, Entrepreneurship Emphasis programs and Limited Curriculum
programs. The first type of entrepreneurship offering is the Comprehensive
program, which has the widest variety of resources. These programs
typically have a large contingent of experienced faculty whose
teaching and research expertise specifically relates to
entrepreneurship. There are often a dozen or more separate course
titles covering everything from entrepreneurship, new venture
development, and small-firm finance to change and innovation,
venture capital, and technology transfer. Schools with
Comprehensive programs have a center dedicated to entrepreneurial
studies, one or more specialty research institutes, a business plan
competition, mentoring programs, and possibly an incubator to help
launch new ventures. Content Continues Below
A second type of program is the Entrepreneurship Emphasis
program. These usually sport a smaller entrepreneurship faculty and
a lower number of course offerings. Students might still be able to
emphasize entrepreneurship within a business or economics major.
There may or may not be a center or research institute, an
incubator, or other business outreach initiatives, and if there
are, these are typically smaller not only in size but also in
scope. The third program type is called a Limited Curriculum program,
which typically has only a few faculty (sometimes just one or two)
teaching a limited number of courses. Students generally do not get
a major or emphasis in entrepreneurship studies, but rather take a
class or two as part of another major. The program is often
designed for undergraduates (but may include some grad students)
and provides limited resources to support student ventures,
business financing or other initiatives. The best of these programs
use innovative courses to integrate entrepreneurial perspectives
across the curriculum, and they often have a broad,
interdisciplinary approach to venture development, management and
strategy. | A Tale of Two Students | | Erin
Defossé and Aruni Gunasegaram met on the first day of MBA
school at the University of Texas at Austin and quickly discovered
they were kindred spirits. Both had left the workplace to return to
college so they could learn the skills needed to start their own
businesses. Before long, they had come up with an idea worth
pursuing--a business that sold technology allowing vending machine
owners to remotely sense when their machines were low on inventory.
They began writing a business plan and decided to enter it in the
University of Texas at Austin's Moot Corp. Competition, said to
be the country's oldest and most lucrative academic business
plan competition. Their plan for IsoChron Data Corp. won the 1997 contest,
earning them a year's free tenancy in a start-up incubator and
seed capital to get underway. The Moot Corp. win led to
introductions to investors, who financed the company's
emergence from the incubator as a going concern. Today, IsoChron
has 14 employees and co-founder Defossé as chief technology
officer, while Gunasegaram--who later became his wife--left the
company to pursue other interests. Defossé, 32, a former NASA engineer,
chose the University of Texas at Austin for its combination of a
top-ranked entrepreneurship program and an equally excellent
reputation in information technology, the field in which he hoped
to start a business. Defossé says he was also drawn to the
emphasis on instruction based on practical experience, using
adjunct professors who are experienced entrepreneurs. There's
no doubt in his mind that the tales of the real world he learned in
the program propelled IsoChron beyond earlier failures. "My
partner and I got surrounded by people who knew about this,"
he says, "and that was the difference." |
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