If you are an entrepreneur, you are already running a business. Why then take business courses on the side, particularly if your business is successful?
Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or Richard Branson did perfectly well without a business education.
Perhaps surprisingly, some academics wouldn’t recommend a conventional business education either. There is a prevalent myth that entrepreneurs are born and not made, but the truth is that while there are certainly some natural born leaders but overall entrepreneurship can be taught as well.
Business author Henry Mintzberg, for example, claims that many programs “educate managers with a 1908 product that uses a 1950 strategy.”
If management education is not up to par, what is there for anyone in the business world to learn from such an education?
The good news is that business schools have taken this criticism to heart, and moved away from pure knowledge absorption to developing skills and social networks.
Leading edge business schools have started putting entrepreneurial programs centre stage, not just to facilitate new venture creation, but for developing a range of competencies, most notably the ability to generate creative solutions.
One of the first schools to put entrepreneurship education at the core of the curriculum was Babson College, in Massachusetts. It is of no surprise that in the Kaplan Newsweek review of colleges it topped the chart as the “hottest for business.”
These entrepreneurial programs appear to be making a difference. At Swinburn University in Australia, 87 per cent of those who graduated started their own business.
A U.S. study found that more than a quarter of entrepreneurship graduates started their own businesses, compared with less than 10 per cent for other types of graduates.
What is obvious is that the students who are studying in these programs are a different kind of student and they undergo a different kind of experience than those in the regular business education programs.
Take the activator program at the University of New Brunswick’s faculty of business administration. New Brunswick entrepreneurs are teamed up with student teams who work on the entrepreneur’s business concept.
This provides for experiential learning, where business, engineering, computer science, and arts students all work on the real-life venture of the entrepreneur.
In the process they get to know local business people, whether suppliers, advisers, business mentors, or angel investors, who become part of their social network.
If you are an entrepreneur, should you partake in this experience?
The founders of a Fredericton startup called VerifyRx did exactly that.
They immersed themselves in the program and recently won top prize at the Business Development Bank of Canada national enterprise competition.
One of the founders, Robert Morrow, said, “the masters program at the faculty of business administration at UNB has provided us with both the business fundamentals and access to expertise (faculty and entrepreneurs) which has helped us make better decisions faster. The faculty and the program have played a huge part in our success to date.”
As their example shows, entrepreneurs can benefit greatly from a professional education.
However, entrepreneurs should sign up for programs that build on the entrepreneurial experience of participants, because that is what creates a practical and useful professional education. Old ways of educating entrepreneurs certainly don’t make the cut these days.
