More schools teaching entrepreneurship

Research-Technology Management, March-April, 2008 by Peter Gwynne

"And Developmental Entrepreneurship always focuses on the poorest of developing countries and often relates to making a difference in a developing society."

Boston University's Entrepreneurial Research Lab goes beyond the traditional priority of creating spinout companies. "We don't see formation of new companies as the end point in the opportunity to learn," Rosen says. "The Lab is very much dedicated to recent graduates of our program who have formed a company; they come back to help us design education for the next generation of entrepreneurship students. They expose our students to living case studies of people as they try to be successful."

At Lehigh, Mitchell emphasizes the entirety of the entrepreneurship experience. "We have students in engineering, science, business, and liberal arts," he explains. "Our approach is strongly centered around the notion that, whatever your major, there is an important set of viewpoints and attitudes to establish. We're talking about basic business skills and creative approaches that work in small startups, large traditional companies, not-for-profits, and the social context."

Intrapreneurship Too

Current courses don't ignore intrapreneurship, the creation of new units within the company context that is frequently referred to as corporate entrepreneurship. Rosen, for example, teaches a course with that title. And corporate research managers who want to hire scientists trained in entrepreneurship can take some consolation from another fact: Students in entrepreneurship courses don't necessarily found their own companies or join start-ups once they graduate. "Some say that they want to start a company, but not now," Rosen explains. "So we advise them first to work for a large corporation to learn operations, then move to a fast-growth mid-sized company to learn flexibility, and then go off to start their own venture to put the pieces together."

Roberts at MIT has a similar experience. "We tell the M.B.A.s in our course that we don't expect many of them to start their own companies straightaway," he says. "A small group will. A much larger group will go to rapidly growing companies that will give them the opportunity to learn on the job in ways that will help them to be entrepreneurs. The bigger group will go to work for the existing companies. GE and other vibrant companies will be attractive to some of our graduates."

Nevertheless, corporate executives must recognize that those graduates come with a mindset different from that of conventional employees. Entrepreneurs in training "need to realize that they are making a lot of decisions under great uncertainty," Mitchell points out. "They need to be comfortable with that, be prepared to give it their best shot, and be very alert to indications that they've got parts of it wrong. This is a major part of the learning experience. This management behavior is very different from the traditional ways of reacting to fully understood situations in a large corporation."

The recruitment of entrepreneurially minded employees thus puts added pressure on managers and other executives in research departments to create a welcoming ambience. "Particularly in the research environment, there comes a time when you need to ask whether you should focus on presently envisaged company strategy or look at new developments that can disrupt the market," Mitchell continues. "The issue of whether to support the company's existing strategy or to seek to change it has always been present in research. But more and more companies now have to confront this directly in the era of increasingly global competition. So they have a widespread need to recruit people with an understanding of the entrepreneurial process."