Chasing the Future: Students Flock to Entrepreneurship Programs

For decades, large corporate enterprises furnished a dependable wellspring of job creation and economic growth in America. No longer. Over the past 30 years, and especially since the job-killing recession hit in late 2007, the action has shifted gradually but decisively to small and start-up businesses.

The result is a new business paradigm that places entrepreneurs in the spotlight on center stage. Think, for example, of Microsoft's Bill Gates, Apple's Steve Jobs, ebay's Meg Whitman, Amazon's Jeff Bezo, and others who reign as rock stars of the business world.

Today, small businesses (those with fewer than 500 employees) account for 99.7 percent of all businesses in the country, according to the Small Business Administration. They also employ about one-half of private-sector employees and, over the past 15 years, have created 64 percent of net new jobs.

No wonder that entrepreneurs, who drive business creation, have become our new social heroes.

As the trend toward entrepreneurship gained momentum, universities across the country rushed to create entrepreneurial and small-business management programs. In 1970, a mere 16 schools offered entrepreneurship courses. That number has since swelled to more than 5,000, according to the Kansas City-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the world's largest foundation devoted to small business promotion. What's more, students at many universities can pursue full-fledged undergraduate and graduate degrees in entrepreneurship, now the fastest-growing field of study at schools nationwide.

Can Entrepreneurship Really Be Taught?

Yes, spurred by job loss and disenchantment with corporate America, entrepreneurs have gone mainstream, and university students are signing up in droves for entrepreneurship programs. Still, the question remains: Can entrepreneurs be made? Or must they be born? Does entrepreneurship rely on inherent qualities such as innovative thinking, a willingness to take risks, resourcefulness and tenacity? Or can those qualities be learned?

Colleges and universities clearly take the view that teaching can produce successful entrepreneurs, and they've followed up on that conviction with substantial financial investment. However, surprisingly little research offers objective evidence that people can learn entrepreneurship.

One notable exception is a recently released Babson College study   perhaps the most thorough attempt to date to confirm the value of entrepreneurship education. Babson professors say they now have "empirical evidence" that teaching entrepreneurship actually makes a difference, influencing many graduates to open startups. Babson is ranked by Entrepreneur online as the number one entrepreneurship school in America.

An earlier New York University study found that entrepreneurship students are more innovative than the norm, and, if they're convinced they can run a business, are more likely to become entrepreneurs.

Management superstar Peter Drucker didn't rely on research, but he nonetheless held strong opinions on the value of entrepreneurship education: "The entrepreneurial mystique? It's not magic, it's not mysterious, and it has nothing to do with genes," Drucker wrote in his 1985 book, Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles. "It's a discipline. And, like any discipline, it can be learned."

New Stature for Entrepreneurs

Howard Stevenson, Harvard University Graduate School of Business, recalls an incident back in 1983, when a senior faculty member ridiculed the term "entrepreneurship." It's nothing but "an intellectual onion," the professor warned a student. "You peel it back layer by layer and when you get to the center, there's nothing there, but you're crying."

As Stevenson notes, times have changed. Today, entrepreneurship has earned a place, not only at Harvard but at schools nationwide, as a serious and respected discipline.

What About Corporations?

Although we normally associate entrepreneurs with start-ups, graduates of entrepreneurship curricula can make important contributions within corporations. For example, they can provide an effective antidote for potentially destructive issues within a company, such as lack of innovation and resistance to change.

Entrepreneurship begins with identifying and committing to an opportunity and secondarily finding the resources needed to make it happen, often on an as-needed basis. Conversely, large corporations' thinking more often begins with the resources they already control, which limits the range of opportunities they envision. Internal entrepreneurs can infuse new life into companies by applying entrepreneurial behaviors such as thinking creatively, identifying out-of-the-box opportunities, actively searching for answers, and bringing a can-do spirit to the enterprise.

The Future of Entrepreneurial Education

Forty years ago, the University of Southern California launched the first Master of Business Administration concentration in entrepreneurship. Today, the art of preparing students to become entrepreneurs remains very much a work in progress, with little consistency from one program to another.

One challenge is finding qualified faculty. Because entrepreneurship is a latecomer to college curricula, many professors have no formal training in the field. However, Babson College and other schools are making impressive strides toward identifying best practices and developing entrepreneurship faculty. In addition, a number of organizations outside academia are working to help move universities' entrepreneurial instruction toward more clear-cut standards of educational excellence. They're also collaborating with schools and government to develop policies friendly to start-up businesses.

As this unique field of study continues to mature, educators must perhaps guard against the tendency to become overly satisfied with the success they've achieved. Because entrepreneurship continually evolves, educators will need to apply to their teaching the very principles they instill in their students: creativity, passion, recognition of opportunity, refusal to accept the status quo, and openness to new ideas and change.

Importantly, a number of top schools have taken the progressive step of breaking from their silos and crossing traditional lines separating academic disciplines. Rather than simply teaching skills, they've moved toward a more fluid and dynamic interdisciplinary structure that promotes real-world innovation and experiential learning. They're also opening the doors of the academy to the community.

"Universities are innovation engines essential to our country's purpose," says Ken Harrington, who heads Washington University's Skandaralis Center for Entrepreneurial Studies in St. Louis. "Entrepreneurship serves as a doorway that connects universities to surrounding communities in ways that advance society's commercial, social, and environmental innovations."

By creatively rethinking their approach to entrepreneurial education, schools like Washington University are setting the pace for practicing what they teach.

Sandra Sherwood-Yates writes about a variety of college and career topics for Inside Career Info.