Can You Teach Entrepreneurship? New Study Says Absolutely.

For instance, most people would assume that the kids of an entrepreneur would grow up and begin their own business, but according to the study, having parents who own their own business has no effect on whether or not a young person will start one.  But it’s a different story when they learn it from a classroom.

The study, called “Does an Entrepreneurship Education Have Lasting Value?  A Study of Career of 3,775 Alumni,” determined that if a college student takes just two classes on entrepreneurship, they will be positively influenced to start their own business.  And the effects are long-reaching.  The alumni followed held on to the intention to start a business for a “long time.”  The classes were a stronger influence even than writing a sample business plan, although that contributed slightly to the student’s intentions.

Some of the results were predictable.  For instance, the higher earning potential a graduate has, the less likely they are to go into business for themselves, and the number of males who intend to—and actually do—start their own business is higher than females of the same class.  Both undergraduates and MBAs had the same rate of both intentions to become an entrepreneur, and actually starting a business.

In their report, the researchers write, “It’s time to cast off the prejudiced question, ‘Why teach entrepreneurship?,’ because we now have excellent empirical evidence that it makes difference.  We think that entrepreneurship should be taught not only for the production and training of entrepreneurs but also to help students decide if they have the right stuff to be entrepreneurs before they embark on careers for which they may be ill-suited.”

“At a more abstract level, we believe that entrepreneurship should be taught to every business student because it is the very origin of all businesses—after all, there would be no business schools if there had never been any entrepreneurs!  Aristotle is reported to have stated that we do not understand a thing until we see it growing from its very beginning.  That alone is justification enough for why every business student should take a basic entrepreneurship course.”

Of course, Babson, as an institution committed to teaching entrepreneurship, has a vested interest in seeing this kind of research published.

However if you consider the fact that small businesses employ the majority of people in our country, it just makes basic, plain sense to me.

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