can risk taking be learned moguls in the making


can entrepreneurship Be taught? Classes for would-be entrepreneurs are a hot trend at America’s universities. But can risk taking be learned?
At 21, diAnA reed had already reached the pinnacle of one career. As a senior at the University of Iowa, she was the Hawkeye Golden Girl, one of the top twirlers in the Big Ten. Every Saturday during football season, she strutted down the 50-yard line in sequins and Spandex, flinging her baton into the sky before a stadium jammed with tens of thousands of howling football fans. Besides four hours of baton practice a day, Reed runs Diana’s Golden Twirlers, a for-profit school she started freshman year. One of her squads won the state twirling championship. A dual major in dance and business, Reed credits her business’s success While taking entrepreneurship classes at the University of Iowa, Diana Reed (center) turned to the four classes on entrepreneurship that she took at Iowa. “I learned how to think about twirl- her passion for batons into a business. ing as a market, not just a sport,” she says. “My career as a competitive twirler may be coming to an end, but I can see there’s almost unlimited potential in the twirling market.” to a survey by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship education. The schools are investing heavi- ly, offering these moguls-in-the-making everything from residence halls outfitted as business incubators to startup money and access Moguls-in-the-Making Reed caught an entrepreneurial fever that is sweeping the nation’s campuses, as students jam into classes to learn how to launch, fi- to business networks. “Twenty years ago students who dared to say they wanted to start their own companies would be sent for coun- PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHANIEL WELCH nance and run their own companies. And we’re not just talking about B-school students. Fledgling engineers, teachers, artists, phar- macists, lawyers, nurses and even dancers have heard the siren call of the startup. During the 2006–07 school year 2,136 two- and four- year colleges and universities offered at least one course in entrepreneurship, up from about 300 in the 1984–85 school year, according seling,” says Jerome Katz, a professor of management at St. Louis University, who has studied the trend. “Today entrepreneurship is the fastest-growing course of study on campuses nationwide.” But can entrepreneurship really be taught in a classroom? Fierce debate erupted over that question when a few maverick professors first introduced entrepreneurship classes to business schools more can entrepreneurship Be taught?
than 20 years ago. Now that the courses are a powerful draw at many institutions, it is an issue worth revisiting, especially given the rising cost of higher education. According to the College Board, the average tab for completing an M.B.A. adds up to $162,000. Many acclaimed business builders say success depends as much on temperament as on teaching. “An entrepreneur is a kind of genius who is born, not made,” says Ann Winblad, a co-founding partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners in San Francisco. She would know: The former software entrepreneur is a prominent venture capitalist who has successfully gambled millions on her ability to discern who could become an entrepreneur. “It’s in the DNA,” she says. “Or, most of the time, it isn’t.” Entrepreneurship is about having guts—something The New Campus Craze professors cannot teach, adds Paul Fleming, who founded P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, a 2,000 Prom gown designer and University of Iowa senior Megan Wettach (second from left) has already
won customers, including (from left) Mariah Cary, Devin Howell, and Layne Sottenkirk. Scottsdale, Ariz.–based restaurant chain that brought in nearly $757 million in sales last 1,500 year. “The steps you have to take, the risks you have to take—I don’t think in a million years 1,000 1,000 right spirit, the University of Utah dropout believes that his greatest lessons came from you can teach it in a classroom,” says Flem- ing. Ultimately, building a successful business 500 founding a previous airline, Morris Air (lat er sold to Southwest). “I never would have is about passion, says Doris Christopher, who founded Pampered Chef in Addison, Ill., a 0 300 started JetBlue unless I had the experience of starting another airline,” he says. “And I ’85 ’91 ’05 direct seller of kitchen tools. She adds, “The passion for your business is not something The number of U.S. universities offering entrepreneurship classes has increased dramatically. guarantee that I never would have started JetBlue at JFK airport if I had listened to the you can learn in a classroom.” SOURCE: Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation experts, who said that you can’t put a low- fare, customer-centric airline in New York. the right Stuff
Consider three of today’s great entrepreneurs: Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. Not one credits the classroom for his success. All But I knew we could do it, and I had a wealth of experience behind me that I trusted to make JetBlue a reality.” are famously and unapologetically dropouts from college. Explaining his reason for quitting Reed College after only six months, Jobs Taking an entrepreneurship class isn’t likely to turn a student with no business smarts into an opportunity-spotting, moneymaking genius. Yet plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that the classes can PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHANIEL WELCH once said, “I couldn’t see the value in it.” (Jobs did find some value in education later, when he dropped in on a calligraphy class that turned out to be of help, he says, in designing typefaces and fonts for the Mac.) Although JetBlue founder David Neeleman argues that entrepreneurship education can help guide those with the speed the learning curve for those with the right stuff. On the most fundamental level, the programs can teach students basic skills, such as managing financials or writing business plans, forcing them to impose structure and deadlines on dreams that they might never achieve otherwise. Take Megan Wettach, a senior and fashion major can entrepreneurship Be taught?
at the University of Iowa. In high school she opened a store to sell prom dresses in her hometown of Mount Pleasant, Iowa. After tak- that most business owners eventually face. And they can give young entrepreneurs a safe place to launch a business and, sometimes, to ing a class in entrepreneurship, she began designing her own gowns, secured a $150,000 line of credit with a bank in Des Moines, signed a learn the valuable lessons that come with business failure—without the consequences that they might face in the real world. contract with an apparel maker in China and negotiated a deal to sell her dresses in Nordstrom. “My professors opened my eyes to the idea Just ask Mark Cuban, who sold his startup, Broadcas.com, to Yahoo! for $6 billion in 1999. He now owns the Dallas Mavericks and co-owns the high-definition-TV network HDNet. “One of the that I can be bigger than a little dress store in Iowa,” Wettach says. “I can be a global force in fashion.” best classes I ever took was entrepreneurship in my freshman year at Indiana University. It really motivated me,” says Cuban. “There is
Safe Starts
The best entrepreneurship programs offer a lot more than just drafting business plans. They can help students make valuable much more to starting a business than just understanding finance, accounting and marketing. Teaching kids what has worked with connections. They can prepare them to tackle the ethical decisions startup companies and learning about experiences that others have had could really make a difference. I know it did for me.” Saying that entrepreneurship cannot be taught is self-serving, adds Quin- tin Primo III, co-founder, CEO and chairman of Capri Capital Ad- visors, a Chicago firm that provides investment capital to the real estate industry. “It’s like saying, ‘I was born to be great.’” Connections count as much in the entrepreneurial world as they do on Wall Street, and that truth isn’t lost on educators. Aware of the valuable bragging rights that birthing successful startups can bring, many professors are happy to play matchmaker for students who are seeking management teams, advisers and investors. Perhaps the most useful purpose an education in entrepreneurship can accomplish is to weed out those who lack the right DNA. Some students discover at school that they can’t stomach the re- alities of running a business. “Entrepreneurship means coming to grips with life’s ambiguousness and then harnessing that anxiety,” says Paul Orfalea, who founded Kinko’s. Adds Stephen Spinelli Jr., the vice provost for entrepreneurship and global management at
Babson College and co-founder of Jiffy Lube International: “Some people can’t be taught to be comfortable in an environment of un- certainty and risk. We have to expose people to that environment and have them make that decision.” And knowing sooner rather than later whether they’ve got “it” can certainly save young people a lot of misery down the road. These future moguls can exchange ideas 24/7 at Babson College’s E-Tower, a residence reserved for student entrepreneurs who operate startups.
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