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Why Business Schools Struggle to Teach Entrepreneurship

31 points by BenSS 15y ago

xfax 15y ago
One of the goals of any school is (or should be) to teach the student 'how to think' rather than 'what to think'. A startup is not some mythical entity that works in mysterious ways. There is a lot of overlap with how larger businesses are run - namely, hiring practices, advertising, market analysis, negotiations etc. These are common themes that are covered in business schools, and startups can benefit from them as well as larger corporations. Sure, startups need to be a lot more inventive in how they deal with early growth, but I don't think an MBA precludes any of the required skills.
davros 15y ago
They struggle to teach entrepreneurship for the same reason they struggle to teach leadership, teamwork, business management (no an MBA doesn't mean you'll be a good manager in a large business), etc. Taught courses can help in all the above areas but only to a limited extent, entrepreneurship is no different.
programminggeek 15y ago
Ok, having gone to business school I'm somewhat qualified to speak on this. First, I think most biz schools aren't staffed with highly successful businesspeople. If you are a crazy successful person in business you probably don't become a professor afterward. Business schools are setup more like trade schools to teach marketing, finance, management, and accounting. Those have little to nothing to do with how to create a product, how to get your first customers and so on and so forth. Most business schools presuppose and existing, successful business of some sort. Take away the existing business and most of what they teach is not terribly useful. Also, the best teacher of entrepreneurship is not school at all. It is experience. Starting a company, incorporating, getting customers, building a product, hiring workers all seems impossibly hard and confusing at first until you get some practice. Starting a business isn't hard, but it's a much different experience than being an office manager or accountant at a fortune 500. I learned more starting my first company about how a business should be run than I ever did sitting in classes. There is no class that can teach you how to start a business unless it actually forces you to start a business. Running a business should be taught like an art school or a culinary school - by doing. Try learning how to cook by just reading recipes or watching cooking shows, but never actually cooking a dish by yourself. Sounds absurd right? Ok, try learning how to start and operate a successful business without ever actually starting or running a business. That is what business schools do and that is why they fail.
- danteembermage 15y ago
  Is it hopeless? What if we presuppose that business schools are going to try, what's the best they could do? I know I'm hijacking the thread here but I'm in the middle of struggling with this exact thing (teaching an entrepreneurship class to MBA students) so any constructive advice would be really helpful. What about an Entrepreneurship class having an assigned lab for example?
  - bjelkeman-again 15y ago
    How long is the class? I would suggest that the mechanics of setting up a company is mostly a list of things to follow: incorporation, taxes, shares, contracts etc. some with branches that needs to be followed. But it is something you only do a limited amount of times (I have done half a dozen). The key thing, I think, is to teach how to create great teams. It is your core team which defines your future. Maybe you want to look at going through an abbreviated version of Steve Blank’s “Four steps to Ephiphany” as well.
- rdl 15y ago
  From what I've seen, Stanford (and maybe Harvard) are kind of in a different league here -- people actually do go teach there after a successful business career (and not even at retirement; some do it in their late 30s/40s/50s). They also do a bit more than act as trade schools to teach skills. There's the huge networking value (only worthwhile at GSB, HSB, (+maybe MIT Sloan or UPenn Wharton for very specific disciplines too)), and they do teach some useful information beyond technical skills. They are still probably not the best opportunity cost weighted use of time for most people (unless you want to work in the highest levels of large companies or government), but they might have some net positive value; lesser MBA programs have negative value. Getting an employer-funded MBA while living through a 2y lockup period after M&A does seem like a great choice though :)
  - soci 15y ago
    Agreed, top business schools should and do have successful business professionals as professors. Of course there are entrepreneurship classes, but are taught by real entrepreneurs.
danteembermage 15y ago
If you were teaching an MBA course on entrepreneurship, what would you put in it? I ask because I'm teaching one right now and I need to do some serious lecture prep for Thursday. Over the semester I've assigned some the the essays like "how to start a startup" and most of Fred Wilson's MBA Mondays with some random other things of interest smattered in (e.g. business models that rocked 2010) but the whole thing is feeling a bit haphazard at the moment. Thursday is going over the different types of financing available, a bit on how they work, and some how a student would go about pitching their startup. If Hacker News could crowdsource me a textbook for next time around that would be amazing ;)
- samt 15y ago
  How about the art of "getting out of the building"? Sending students into the real world on three or four customer development projects for hypothetical products would be very valuable.
kenjackson 15y ago
Entrepreneur's struggle with entrepreneurship. There's data that basically shows that successful entrepreneurs in one space are no more succssfull than anyone else when the start a new venture in a new space. And I suspect the main reason why you're likely to be more successful if you stay in the same space has much to do with reputation and network than anything that could actually be taught. The big takeaway I have is that everything you learned running your first startup is generally not applicable to your second startup, except those things you learn in a b-school (tax law, forming corporations, equity, etc...). And surprisingly this is also true of management in a F500 company too, but just at GE it's a lot harder to rock the boat -- for better or worse.
fezzl 15y ago
To put it crudely, because professors don't know shit.
dkrich 15y ago
I too am an MBA grad, and my experience tells me that entrepreneurship is not a skill that can be taught, but rather can be aided with some practical understanding of law, accounting, and marketing tactics, which, along with a nice network of smart people, can absolutely be gained at a top MBA program. An MBA is neither a necessity nor a setback en route to a successful career as an entrepreneur. That's why you can quickly come up with stories of the Mark Zuckerberg's, Andrew Carnegie's, and Steve Jobs' who never graduated college, but just as quickly come up with stories of the Mark Pincus', Phil Knight's, and Jeff Skoll's who got MBA's and became immensely successful entrepreneurs. In fact, MBA's as a whole have a pretty good winning percentage. This could be due to a number of factors, very few I would guess actually having much to do with the education obtained in the MBA program courses themselves.
known 15y ago
http://www.aim.edu/ http://www.aim.edu/ mandates MBA graduates to do a startup as part of their curriculum.
localhost3000 15y ago
Did anyone else have trouble reading this article? It felt like it was written for a group of third graders - extremely simple and repetitive writing...but then I started thinking, "oh yea, it's been edited for the search engines..." and this made me sad for the state of written media.
j_baker 15y ago
Am I the only one who sees the whole idea of an entrepreneurship program at schools as being silly? It just seems to me that a classroom education is a wholly inadequate way to teach people to strike out on their own and do something new.
- Joakal 15y ago
  There are technical, business, marketing and idea entrepreneurs (probably others). I don't believe each know what the other does: Programming, Stock Options, Networking, etc. Maybe a program would be too structured for your tastes, but implemented well; it can reinforce potential entrepreneurs' knowledge. They could, of course, offer them in instalments as some entrepreneurs know some stuff and don't know other stuff but that's a different topic.
dimmuborgir 15y ago
The same way how music schools struggle to (or don't intend to) teach students how to become great musicians. Music schools only (or can only) teach students the compositions of other great musicians.
- impendia 15y ago
  False. I had a good friend who was doing her DMA and she was a shockingly good violinist. I also went to an orchestra concert that was all (doctoral) student compositions. They were quite excellent; I never would have guessed that they were anything short of top-notch professional.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - dimmuborgir 15y ago
    I know where you're coming from, but in the entrepreneurship context I don't see any role of music education in your examples since the only objective measure of the greatness of a music is its commercial success or cultural impact or both.

31 points by BenSS 15y ago

xfax 15y ago

One of the goals of any school is (or should be) to teach the student 'how to think' rather than 'what to think'. A startup is not some mythical entity that works in mysterious ways. There is a lot of overlap with how larger businesses are run - namely, hiring practices, advertising, market analysis, negotiations etc. These are common themes that are covered in business schools, and startups can benefit from them as well as larger corporations. Sure, startups need to be a lot more inventive in how they deal with early growth, but I don't think an MBA precludes any of the required skills.

davros 15y ago

They struggle to teach entrepreneurship for the same reason they struggle to teach leadership, teamwork, business management (no an MBA doesn't mean you'll be a good manager in a large business), etc. Taught courses can help in all the above areas but only to a limited extent, entrepreneurship is no different.

programminggeek 15y ago

Ok, having gone to business school I'm somewhat qualified to speak on this. First, I think most biz schools aren't staffed with highly successful businesspeople. If you are a crazy successful person in business you probably don't become a professor afterward. Business schools are setup more like trade schools to teach marketing, finance, management, and accounting. Those have little to nothing to do with how to create a product, how to get your first customers and so on and so forth. Most business schools presuppose and existing, successful business of some sort. Take away the existing business and most of what they teach is not terribly useful. Also, the best teacher of entrepreneurship is not school at all. It is experience. Starting a company, incorporating, getting customers, building a product, hiring workers all seems impossibly hard and confusing at first until you get some practice. Starting a business isn't hard, but it's a much different experience than being an office manager or accountant at a fortune 500. I learned more starting my first company about how a business should be run than I ever did sitting in classes. There is no class that can teach you how to start a business unless it actually forces you to start a business. Running a business should be taught like an art school or a culinary school - by doing. Try learning how to cook by just reading recipes or watching cooking shows, but never actually cooking a dish by yourself. Sounds absurd right? Ok, try learning how to start and operate a successful business without ever actually starting or running a business. That is what business schools do and that is why they fail.

danteembermage 15y ago
Is it hopeless? What if we presuppose that business schools are going to try, what's the best they could do? I know I'm hijacking the thread here but I'm in the middle of struggling with this exact thing (teaching an entrepreneurship class to MBA students) so any constructive advice would be really helpful. What about an Entrepreneurship class having an assigned lab for example?
- bjelkeman-again 15y ago
  How long is the class? I would suggest that the mechanics of setting up a company is mostly a list of things to follow: incorporation, taxes, shares, contracts etc. some with branches that needs to be followed. But it is something you only do a limited amount of times (I have done half a dozen). The key thing, I think, is to teach how to create great teams. It is your core team which defines your future. Maybe you want to look at going through an abbreviated version of Steve Blank’s “Four steps to Ephiphany” as well.
rdl 15y ago
From what I've seen, Stanford (and maybe Harvard) are kind of in a different league here -- people actually do go teach there after a successful business career (and not even at retirement; some do it in their late 30s/40s/50s). They also do a bit more than act as trade schools to teach skills. There's the huge networking value (only worthwhile at GSB, HSB, (+maybe MIT Sloan or UPenn Wharton for very specific disciplines too)), and they do teach some useful information beyond technical skills. They are still probably not the best opportunity cost weighted use of time for most people (unless you want to work in the highest levels of large companies or government), but they might have some net positive value; lesser MBA programs have negative value. Getting an employer-funded MBA while living through a 2y lockup period after M&A does seem like a great choice though :)
- soci 15y ago
  Agreed, top business schools should and do have successful business professionals as professors. Of course there are entrepreneurship classes, but are taught by real entrepreneurs.

danteembermage 15y ago

If you were teaching an MBA course on entrepreneurship, what would you put in it? I ask because I'm teaching one right now and I need to do some serious lecture prep for Thursday. Over the semester I've assigned some the the essays like "how to start a startup" and most of Fred Wilson's MBA Mondays with some random other things of interest smattered in (e.g. business models that rocked 2010) but the whole thing is feeling a bit haphazard at the moment. Thursday is going over the different types of financing available, a bit on how they work, and some how a student would go about pitching their startup. If Hacker News could crowdsource me a textbook for next time around that would be amazing ;)

samt 15y ago
How about the art of "getting out of the building"? Sending students into the real world on three or four customer development projects for hypothetical products would be very valuable.

kenjackson 15y ago

Entrepreneur's struggle with entrepreneurship. There's data that basically shows that successful entrepreneurs in one space are no more succssfull than anyone else when the start a new venture in a new space. And I suspect the main reason why you're likely to be more successful if you stay in the same space has much to do with reputation and network than anything that could actually be taught. The big takeaway I have is that everything you learned running your first startup is generally not applicable to your second startup, except those things you learn in a b-school (tax law, forming corporations, equity, etc...). And surprisingly this is also true of management in a F500 company too, but just at GE it's a lot harder to rock the boat -- for better or worse.

fezzl 15y ago

To put it crudely, because professors don't know shit.

dkrich 15y ago

I too am an MBA grad, and my experience tells me that entrepreneurship is not a skill that can be taught, but rather can be aided with some practical understanding of law, accounting, and marketing tactics, which, along with a nice network of smart people, can absolutely be gained at a top MBA program. An MBA is neither a necessity nor a setback en route to a successful career as an entrepreneur. That's why you can quickly come up with stories of the Mark Zuckerberg's, Andrew Carnegie's, and Steve Jobs' who never graduated college, but just as quickly come up with stories of the Mark Pincus', Phil Knight's, and Jeff Skoll's who got MBA's and became immensely successful entrepreneurs. In fact, MBA's as a whole have a pretty good winning percentage. This could be due to a number of factors, very few I would guess actually having much to do with the education obtained in the MBA program courses themselves.

known 15y ago

http://www.aim.edu/ http://www.aim.edu/ mandates MBA graduates to do a startup as part of their curriculum.

localhost3000 15y ago

Did anyone else have trouble reading this article? It felt like it was written for a group of third graders - extremely simple and repetitive writing...but then I started thinking, "oh yea, it's been edited for the search engines..." and this made me sad for the state of written media.

j_baker 15y ago

Am I the only one who sees the whole idea of an entrepreneurship program at schools as being silly? It just seems to me that a classroom education is a wholly inadequate way to teach people to strike out on their own and do something new.

Joakal 15y ago
There are technical, business, marketing and idea entrepreneurs (probably others). I don't believe each know what the other does: Programming, Stock Options, Networking, etc. Maybe a program would be too structured for your tastes, but implemented well; it can reinforce potential entrepreneurs' knowledge. They could, of course, offer them in instalments as some entrepreneurs know some stuff and don't know other stuff but that's a different topic.

dimmuborgir 15y ago

The same way how music schools struggle to (or don't intend to) teach students how to become great musicians. Music schools only (or can only) teach students the compositions of other great musicians.

impendia 15y ago
False. I had a good friend who was doing her DMA and she was a shockingly good violinist. I also went to an orchestra concert that was all (doctoral) student compositions. They were quite excellent; I never would have guessed that they were anything short of top-notch professional.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- dimmuborgir 15y ago
  I know where you're coming from, but in the entrepreneurship context I don't see any role of music education in your examples since the only objective measure of the greatness of a music is its commercial success or cultural impact or both.