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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>That is what business schools do and that is why they fail.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>If Hacker News could crowdsource me a textbook for next time around that would be amazing ;)
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.
One of the goals of any school is (or should be) to teach the student 'how to think' rather than 'what to think'.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Taught courses can help in all the above areas but only to a limited extent, entrepreneurship is no different.
The same way how music schools struggle to (or don't intend to) teach students how to become great musicians.<p>Music schools only (or can only) teach students the compositions of other great musicians.