When I was 15 years old, I created my own small business. I used to collect small pieces of fabric that my mother had dismissed from her sewing and with those little samples I used to make hair ornaments. I made so many of them that I started to sell them in my school, and when everybody had bought one, I started to sell them to gift shops. Soon enough, I began to see them, in different places of town, bought by people who paid four times the amount that I had sold them for. But I also saw how the competition was catching up with me. I worked hard at fulfilling the orders with competitive pricing, but eventually I decided to give up this business due to my fear of lack of experience. Consequently, I decided to put my dream of creating a business on hold and focus on studying industrial engineering and later a MBA. My thoughts were to gain and learn more business knowledge and the needed tools for success. Yes, I feel I learned that, but I also faced many other obstacles such as fear, lack of passion and creativity. Whether I was born as an entrepreneur is a question that I am still trying to learn.
Nowadays, many people are starting up their own business and some struggle with the needed skills. Looking back on this, I realized perhaps I was a little entrepreneur and I wish I had understood entrepreneurship better.
An “entrepreneur” is defined by The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation as “one who takes advantage of knowledge and resources to identify and pursue opportunities that initiate change and create value in one’s life and those of others”, and “entrepreneurship” is described by the University of Illinois’s Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership as “a process that can lead to creative solutions to social problems or the formation of new and innovative enterprises”. According to this information, it can be said that entrepreneurship is an entrepreneurial spirit formed by a set of skills and knowledge that once combined, implemented, and launched can create opportunities, develop new businesses and therefore generate wealth for individuals and society.
The obvious question is whether those with entrepreneurial drive were born with the needed skills or they learned from their environment. Many continue to debate this question and express opposing points of views.
Ann Winblad, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners’ co-founder, thinks that entrepreneurs have a natural talent that cannot be reproduced. However, Northeastern University in association with Entrepreneur Magazine made an investigation and found that only 42.3 percent of the entrepreneurs interviewed affirm that entrepreneurship comes from inside. The rest of them, 57.7 percent, say that that encouragement came from the exterior environment such as family or business partners. George O’Brien, entrepreneur and writer, questions whether entrepreneurial skills are teachable or are innate aptitudes such as playing a musical instrument is a continuing debate.
While disagreements continue, one can agree the fact that there are three main capabilities that can and should be taught and developed in order to make entrepreneurs, such as innovation, persistence and fearlessness.
The first ability that can and should be taught is innovation. Joseph A. Schumpeter, twentieth-century economist and entrepreneurship theorist, declared that innovation is creating “new combinations, new products, production methods or industrial combinations”.
Dr. Sarah Jack and Dr. Alistair R. Anderson, who participated at the Concluding Conference of the University Entrepreneurship Programme, Strathclyde University, strongly affirm that innovation is an unteachable talent. However, there are other opinions such as that of Schumpeter, who believed the opposite. He stated that innovation is an entrepreneurial function part of the economy and as such can be taught. William Bygrave, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson College in Wellesley, affirms that even though the center is not able to create a Bill Gates, a Liz Claiborne nor an Albert Einstein, entrepreneurship is definitely teachable. Megan Wettach, a fashion student at the University of Iowa, expresses that her vision and ideas were inspired by her teachers. Even though the dialog and disagreement on this subject is ongoing, many strongly believe innovation can be taught. Dean A. Shepherd, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, and Evan J. Douglas, Australian Institute of Company Director, support those ideas when they affirm that professors must find new ways of teaching, therefore it is possible to teach innovation through helping students face true inventive process experiences. According to Jim Theroux, Professor of Entrepreneurship at University of Massachusetts and a former business owner, students have created fascinating initiatives in class, from “importing hybrid pearls from China to developing new sources of microbes for creating pharmaceutical drugs”. He adds that some of those ideas were kept as part of the class, but others have been operated and published. That is evidence that the efforts by new forms of education have been successful in the real business world.
Teachers cannot get inside of human brain and create new ideas. However, educational authorities have moved from theory to practice, where the students have the opportunity to learn innovative thinking in order to awake their talents. This would also help those who were not born with inner skills to learn the needed methods to develop new ideas.
The second entrepreneurial capability that can and should be taught is persistence. Persistence can be defined as a combination of self-confidence, hard work, and resilience when the entrepreneur develops the capacity to get over business failure and that gives him the impulse to start all over.
Some people feel that persistence cannot be taught. For example, Gray and Field cite three entrepreneurs who insist that persistence is an innate characteristic. It’s not possible to teach students to have bravery, asserts Paul Fleming, Chang’s China Bistro’s founder with $675 million in sales in 2005. Doris Christopher, entrepreneur and Pampered Chef’s founder, states that it is impossible to teach students to be passionate for their businesses. David Neeleman, entrepreneur and JetBlue founder, says that he wouldn’t have developed his company if he had listened to the experts, so he just followed his instincts. In other words, he believes that this kind of spirit can’t be taught.
However, Theodore W. Schultz, Nobel Prize in economics in 1979, declared that adapting, correcting and changing resources in order to transform conditions are capabilities of entrepreneurs that can be developed and enhanced with education, instruction and practice. David Adewumi, entrepreneur and writer, who leads the overall vision and product strategy for the start-up dubbed the ‘Wikipedia of Stories,’ affirms that even though there are individuals who were born with this persistence attitude, it is also possible to develop the habit in those who weren’t born with it.
The persistence capability can be developed through techniques that encourage people to get exposed to difficult situations and overcome them, being stronger and with a lesson learned. For example, a student in classroom is confronting a simulated risk situation and he gets involved in a decision-making process, such as to design, create and sell a product that satisfy a need in a market under crisis conditions. Once he fails, he has to find the causes of failure, and use solving-problem techniques in order to make the appropriate adjustments and start all over again with new products and new strategies.
The third and last entrepreneurial ability that can and should be taught is fearlessness. Many students strongly believe that fearlessness cannot be taught because innate courage cannot be inculcated. Christine Comaford-Lynch, entrepreneur, consultant, and author of the book “Rules for Renegades,” says, “I don’t have what it takes, I don’t know the right people, I’m poor, I’m scared, I’m unpopular, I’m dweeby and lack of social graces”. However, she also lectures about how our pessimistic thoughts should be blocked and people should mentally manipulate fear in order to gain self-confidence. Similarly, an Entrepreneur Magazine survey shows that 23 percent of the entrepreneurs answered that they had experienced fear of failure and 55.2 percent of the group manifested to have anxiety of failing, but they trusted their self-confidence and capabilities. With this scenario, it is possible to affirm that entrepreneurship is not a matter of not to feel fear, it is a matter of overcoming that fear and continuing. In order to achieve that goal, educational programs have made use of several teaching techniques. Professors challenge students to confront situations of extreme fear of failure and from there to implement actions to facilitate beating those fears and doubts. These situations can be acted putting in practice simulators such as “Cash flow”. According to the Cash Flow Manual, this game is a classroom tool that encourages students to manage money while they learn about business subjects. I personally had the opportunity to play this game in a mastermind group, which is a union formed by business owners from different industries. The game is a model of real business environment. Players have to face actual fears that are experienced in real life. For example, the possibilities of losing employment, money, businesses or properties. The teacher, at this point, takes advantage of this situation and guides players with some tools such as analytical thinking, success and failure cases, projections, among others, in order to help them overcome their fears and achieve their best.
All people have experienced fear during their lives. They develop the capability to control those doubts and insecurities and to use them in their own benefit, over the years. How quickly that skill can be developed depends on the number of experiences that have been experienced. That is why confronting students with risk and fear accelerates learning process and increases the boldness.
In conclusion, even though the debate continues, it is very clear that teaching the skills of innovation, persistence and fearlessness helps develop entrepreneurs. It has also been observed that these entrepreneurial characteristics can and must be taught using revolutionary teaching-learning techniques as practical as possible in order to assure the awakening of hidden talents. Even those which were considered innate can be awakened and developed.
Although Saee says “The individual will always be responsible for their own success” , academic authorities are also responsible to encourage and to weed out those who weren’t born with that passion and assist everybody find and create their own path.Clearly, I would have greatly benefited from these entrepreneurial characteristics when I was a little entrepreneur or during my university studies and I could have accelerated my entrepreneurial awakening instead of delaying the process. Today, entrepreneurship is considered a legitimate science and receives a great deal of attention from educational institutions, entrepreneurs and societies. Therefore, students must be encouraged to think outside the box, learn and experience those critical characteristics that can be learned and developed through innovative teaching-learning methods in order to help them realized their entrepreneurial potentials and in the long run will give inestimable benefits to the world.
References
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