Entrepreneurship: Nature or Nurture?

So are entrepreneurs born or made? I admit, applying the "nurture" versus "nature" debate to business models is a stretch, but clearly there's at least one camp that sees entrepreneurship as being "made", as in "nurture" -- the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University whose director is Arthur A. Boni who is the John R. Thorne Professor of Entrepreneurship. Whew!

Putting aside the length of the moniker, the program offers both undergraduate- and graduate-level classes on topics ranging from "Entrepreneurship for Scientists" to "Technology Commercialization Business Development Strategy." CMU isn't alone in the entrepreneur education business; in fact, it was ranked 6th in the U.S. by the Wall Street Journal last year, behind similar programs at Stanford University, Babson College, the University of California-Berkeley, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

So clearly, there are a lot of very smart people who believe that you can teach entrepreneurs to be entrepreneurs. And not just in the U.S. either. As it turns out, CMU is exporting its entrepreneur education program to Qatar in a nine-month long program called the Executive Entrepreneurship Certificate Program which aims to boost opportunities for creating technology start-ups in Doha, Qatar. The program teaches skills and methods for creating technology-based ventures through practical, real-world projects.

"Entrepreneurship can be taught," said Arthur A. Boni, John R. Thorne Chair of Entrepreneurship and director of the Donald H. Jones Center, "but effective teaching requires a blend of experiential learning coupled with academic rigor."

There you have it -- "entrepreneurship can be taught."

Okay, I go along with that, but I don't know if that jibes with the recently released Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. One thing the Kauffman study found is that in the U.S. approximately 465,000 new businesses per month are launched, a level of entrepreneurial activity that's remained fairly consistent between 2005 and 2006.

I'd also bet that a majority of those entrepreneurs launching businesses did not have the opportunity to attend any of the top entrepreneur education programs. Which then suggests that maybe there's something to the "nature" part of entrepreneurship. Or maybe it is that a lot of people lost their jobs and launched new businesses to put food on the table. Eating, I think we all can agree, is a most certainly "nature."

Furthermore, I'd agree that there's probably a difference in scope and complexity between, say, a graduate of the Stanford Univeristy entrepreneur education program who is launching a biotech start-up, and someone starting a lawn-care business.

Irony being what it is, the CMU is looking to entrepreneurs in Qatar, while at the same time, according to the Kauffman study, most of the entrepreneurs in the U.S. are born outside the U.S.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:49 AM  Permalink