To neglect entrepreneurship or relegate it to the educational sidelines makes undergraduate learning orthogonal to the world it is supposed to help students learn to understand.
Entrepreneurship has long been overlooked as a topic of economic study, but recent scholarship has underscored its leading role as a major generator of wealth in the contemporary economy. The continual creation of new enterprises is a fundamental reason for the economic growth and technological innovation of the American economy over at least the past two decades. Entrepreneurship’s centrality to the steady improvement of human welfare explains its pertinence to American college learning.
Although entrepreneurship has been a relatively standard component of the curricula of business schools, it has begun to emerge as a discrete area of study of ever broadening interest and applicability. The increased importance of entrepreneurship is evident in the academy.
Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest growing subjects in today’s undergraduate curricula. In the past three decades, formal programs (majors, minors and certificates) in entrepreneurship have more than quadrupled, from 104 in 1975 to more than 500 in 2006.
The development of discrete courses in entrepreneurship has been exponential. The Kauffman Foundation has stimulated and helped focus this curricular development with its Kauffman CampusesSM Initiative, which fosters cross – campus education in entrepreneurship and now covers nineteen universities of varying sorts across the United States. The exceptional curricular expansion of entrepreneurship is a good reason to rethink its place in the general undergraduate curriculum Inc reas ingly, univer s ities them selves are agents of entrepreneurship. Through offices of technology transfer, schools encourage and enable their faculty to create ventures that transform their research into products for the market. Research universities are an important though not the only source of innovation and the creation of new products and processes that become the foundation of new firms and enterprises.
For universities to advocate entrepreneurship as a core activity for faculty and then fail to teach that activity broadly to their students disconnects the school’s mission from its practice and is educationally incoherent. Finally, although it is among the newer subjects in the academy, entrepreneurship fulfills many of the established goals of a high-quality education. Entrepreneurship is not an isolated activity. It is embedded in larger structures. Even if conceived narrowly as solelya business practice , entrepreneurship ultimately is unintelligible without knowledge of the interlocking and reinforcing systems of law, economics, politics, finance, and cultural values that make it plausible and thereby foster it. Moreover, because entrepreneurship has a practical focus, its study naturally and easily demonstrates how ideals and theories so called pure knowledge actually affect behavior.
Indeed, entrepreneurship’s focus on the pragmatic can channel the ambition and talent of young people away from fanciful speculation and toward concrete projects. As a magnet for the authentic integration of varied fields of learning and as a bridge between theory and practice , entrepreneurship is a superb vehicle with which to achieve the aims of the broad, effective, and integrated learning that marks a strong college education. Entrepreneurship is a distinctive form of human agency that fuses the human desire for the ever better with confidence in the human ability to fulfill that desire. It mixes optimism with realism. As a defining characteristic of American society, economics, and culture, entrepreneurship has a valuable role to play in American higher education. How Entrepreneurship Fits in College If entrepreneurship belongs in college learning, how should we teach it and learn
it Does it need to become a distinct field of learning, a discipline, in order to find a durable place in the overall curriculum Like philosophy or music , entrepreneurship is a field of study that generates rather than discovers or encounters its subject matter. Unlike history, sociology, or an hropology , for instance , entrepreneurship creates what it studies. Because of it s practical focus , entrepreneurship’s greatest exponents are its innovators and practitioners the creators of new enterprises, firms, products, and services rather than its students.
Like music , but unlike philosophy, entrepreneurship requires more than other professionals to be consequential. Philosophers may write primarily for other philosophers, but entrepreneurs and musicians (both composers and performers) require a population of amateurs in order to be complete.
For music, that population is the audience. For entrepreneurs, it is the market. To see how entrepreneurship can find its place in a college curriculum, a comparison of entrepreneurship to music is instructive. Education in entrepreneurship, as in music, operates along a continuum of learning that extends from the professional to the amateur. In music, at one end of the continuum is the composer or the virtuoso performer.
At the other end is the audience, which values what the composer and performer do. Along the way are multiple, discrete aspects of music conducting, mastering a specific instrument, theory, history, etc. that contribute to the overall intelligibility of the subject and improve performance.
Comprehensive and substantive education in music embraces this continuum and neglects none of it. It teaches the virtuoso how to improve and the amateur how to appreciate. It shows how music works, charts its changes, and analyzes its elements. Increasingly, it examines the conditions of music’s creation and persistence.
In the final analysis, music is not and cannot be solely self-referential. It reaches outwards to non-specialists to bring benefit and enrichment to their lives. Music also is a competitive field and therefore a meritocracy. But its notion of merit is neither pristine nor absolute.
It is affected by the audience, which helps to shape the subject and determine the kind and quality of music that will matter. The higher the audience’s taste and level of expectation, the better the music becomes and must become.
Because of its focus on the audience, music has a capacity to affect a vast population. Nearly everything that is true for music also is true for entrepreneurship. At one level, education in entrepreneurship must be about the entrepreneur, the pracioner. Entrepreneurship education must give students the practical, how-to technical skills to create, manage, assess, and sustain new enterprises. Among other things, they need to learn to devise a product, create a business plan, find new resources, build a company, market heir innovation, and so forth.
To be sure, skills alone hardly generate new enterprises, but they surely facilitate their development. At the other end of the continuum, education in entrepreneurship also must be for the amateur, the consumer, who is the ultimate focus of entrepreneurship. The amateurs constitute the market.
They consume, and, in so doing, they assess. Just as education can help students who are not musicians learn how to appreciate the skills, intelligence, and artistic values that go into the creation and performance of great music, so education can help students who are not entrepreneurs understand the skills, intelligence, and the political, cultural, and economic infrastructure that enable the generation of new enterprises.
Entrepreneurship also is a matter of merit, but, as in music, what counts as entrepreneurial merit is constrained by the market. Between the ends of this continuum of learning, as in music, there are many d screte element s of entrepreneurship some applied, some theoretical that can constitute the foci of individual courses and projects. When one views the comprehensive framework of entrepreneurship education against the diver se ins titutional types and educational missions that comprise American higher learning, it seems unlikely that any single set of educational practices or programs can apply uniformly across the board.
Different schools have discrete populations, histories, cultures, and purposes, and American colleges and universities serve a variety of educational functions with increasingly diverse age groups. For instance, entrepreneurship in a university with a business school may differ from entrepreneurship in a university without one. Entrepreneurship in community colleges, which educate an important sector of the American population, may diverge from entrepreneurship in a research university.
Entrepreneurship cannot be a one size fits all discipline.
Each program will have a particular set of outcomes, a defined target audience, and will fit into a local ecosystem. Our aim, therefore, is not to prescribe a single set of educational practices. Rather, we want to encourage educational communities, including their faculties, administrations, staffs, students, parents, and trustees, to devise the kinds of education in entrepreneurship that are appropriate to their goals, populations, heritages, and resources, and that find a legitimate place in the continuum of learning sketched above.
Education in entrepreneurship needs to be as responsive to the concreteness and integrity of its diverse contexts of learning its varied markets as entrepreneurship itself. This report focuses on three major areas: the curriculum, the co-curriculum, and the management of universities. We aim to be suggestive rather than prescriptive, to indicate both substantive rationales and concrete measures that universities can adopt to make entrepreneurship fundamental to what they do and how they do it.
