Entrepreneurs are Made

 

Julian Lange

Babson College

What makes you think entrepreneurship can be taught?
I think much of the recent research shows that entrepreneurship can be taught. The thing that some people talking about genetics are getting at is that people have different proclivities toward entrepreneurship and different sets of skills or endowments intellectually. Maybe, simply put, you can't teach someone to be passionate about entrepreneurship. On the other hand, I've been teaching for 20 years, and in my experience people can definitely discover their passion for entrepreneurship in the classroom. And in terms of general skills, if they start out with interests or endowments that make them more likely to be entrepreneurs or less likely, you can enhance their ability to be entrepreneurs through teaching. In some ways we can say there is a certain element of entrepreneurs that are born, not made. But some entrepreneurs can be made better.

Is there any evidence that education can increase one's likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur?
There's a study I did along with professors William Bygrave and Edward Marram at Babson, along with two grad students, investigating whether entrepreneurial education has a lasting influence. It's one of several papers in the past few years looking at that question. What we found is that education does have a lasting influence over whether people became entrepreneurs.
We had a database put together of over 4,000 Babson alumni from between 1985 and 2009, two-thirds of whom had taken at least one of our core elective courses on entrepreneurship. What we found was that taking two or more entrepreneurship elective courses positively affected their intention to become and their becoming an entrepreneur. The effect was there at the time they graduated and long after that.

What about risk-taking? Isn't that a core entrepreneurial skill that can't be taught?
There's a continuum, from people who don't want to take risks to daredevils and everything in between. I've observed many entrepreneurs over time, and it's on a spectrum. I'm an entrepreneur myself; I was CEO of Software Arts, the startup that created VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, and I'm no daredevil. Sure, entrepreneurs are better if they're willing to take risks, but they also have to respect that risk.
Some people don't want any risk, and some are always looking for risk. Most entrepreneurs I know and observe are people in the middle. They're not willing to take risk for risk's sake, but they'll take it if it's necessary to start or advance or keep their business going.

If risk-taking isn't the key, what skills are important to entrepreneurs?
One of the things we teach in entrepreneurship and give exposure to is opportunity recognition. Some people may go through life and don't quite see the opportunities. Once they look at the world through a slightly different lens, they start to see what may have potential. Opportunities in general don't jump out and you say "Ahh!"--they have to be shaped, they have to be created, and once people understand that process, they will never look at the world the same way again. It doesn't mean they will act on the opportunity--that's a different part of the process. But if people are more sensitive to seeing opportunities, they are more likely to act on them.
There's one course I teach that's more of a survey of entrepreneurship. I always tell the students the objective is not to make them say "I want to be an entrepreneur!" at the end of the course. I want them to understand what it means. Sometimes people romanticize entrepreneurship and look at successful entrepreneurs and think it happened overnight. At the end of the course people say, "I enjoyed it, but I don't think I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to be something else." But periodically I'll get communications saying, "Remember me? I was someone who said I didn't want to be an entrepreneur. Check out the website my partners and I just started." I'm not sure if they would have been sensitized to the opportunity if they hadn't taken the course.
Education helps people to change at different points in their business and personal lives. It helps them become more receptive to entrepreneurship.

Is there any type of person or personality type that should avoid entrepreneurship?
I would put it in a more positive way. I have seen many different people become entrepreneurs with very different skill sets and at different points in their careers. I think it would be hard to make a bet that someone is not going to be an entrepreneur based on their skills and proclivities or at a particular point in their life. The exceptions prove the rule again and again. If we eliminate the extremes, we find a very wide continuum of people who become successful. No one person has all the skills necessary to handle everything him or herself. You get a team to cover your bases. Even if one person has everything going for them, there are only 24 hours a day in a seven-day week. You need other people to work with you and make up for additional skills you don't have.
In no way are we saying that certain people don't have the characteristics to be entrepreneurs. I've observed many, many combinations of characteristics that have been successful. Not everyone is cookie-cutter.

What do entrepreneurship programs offer students?
I think there are a lot of advantages of entrepreneurship programs. One of them is to develop skills they may already have to be more useful--technical skills or leadership skills. Also, being in an environment where other people are interested helps in networking, getting feedback and determining what is necessary at different stages of an idea. One course for MBA students I teach puts them together with successful entrepreneurs. That one-on-one experience can be very helpful to them.
Babson takes a very practical approach. We give students a wide experience in learning, then doing. We talk about entrepreneurship through thought and action, both of which are necessary.

What if it turns out entrepreneurship is primarily genetic? Would that change the way you teach?
What you want to do when you're a professor is to develop and present students with the best possible tools for becoming entrepreneurs. I'm interested in any and all evidence to do this. I think these studies are interesting, and there are characteristics that anecdotally you can observe that can be associated with successful entrepreneurs. But one of the issues I have has to do with association and correlation and causality. There may be characteristics that correspond to entrepreneurs, but it reminds me of what Thomas Edison said [about] "1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." You have to work at it and shape it.
People have different skill sets and natural talents. Look at other analogies. People in sports or music might have great talent or physical strength, but the people who are the most outstanding might not be the people with the most physical strength. Often they are people who work hard, try to overcome deficiencies and put things together in a package that works for them. In no way am I saying people can't have characteristics that make entrepreneurship easier, but there's a combo there, and learning skills is an extremely important part of the process.
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