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Thanks for your comments and insights.

I am always surprised that we would expect business schools (for long measured on increasing the salaries of their graduates....or even worse on the number of publications in A journals) to support entrepreneurship.

I think there is growing recognition that engineering and design schools have an increasing role to play in addressing this agenda.

Kind regards

Andrew Maxwell Ph.D.
Assoc. Prof. Entrepreneurial Engineering
Bergeron Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology
Lassonde School of Engineering
York University, Toronto Canada.



From:        Pablo MARTIN de HOLAN <pmdeh@INCAE.EDU>
To:        ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU,
Date:        2014/12/23 03:04 PM
Subject:        [ENTREP] The bitter truth about Entrepreneurship
Sent by:        Entrepreneurship Division Listserv <ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>

---

Dear all,

The Financial Times offered me the opportunity to comment on the state of Entrepreneurship education, and here is what I wrote in 900 words or less: "Business schools are not serving entrepreneurs (...) They assume that learning how to build, tune and decorate a piano will automatically make you a good pianist. (...) That is the role of a business school: to act as a safe place, a sandbox where entrepreneurs can hone their skills and develop new ones, meet other entrepreneurs and investors, but especially, minimise the cost of their mistakes and decide if the exciting life of the entrepreneur is for them and their families."


As you will see, the article is not subtle but it addresses a deep flaw in the way that some institutions (repeat: some) teach Entrepreneurship. Happy to engage in an Academic debate with you all around this, but please let´s not start a contest on who teaches better: the objective was not to point out at "good" and "bad" schools, but to discuss how to serve better the entrepreneurial ecosystem around our Universities and Business Schools

Find it here

http://tinyurl.com/FT-Bitter-Truth

And of course, happy holidays!

Pablo MARTIN de HOLAN

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Ventures HO!

************************************** This message is from ENTREP which is sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management. Please do not post messages with attached files. Commercial messages or spammed messages are not allowed on the list. The use of auto-responder "out-of-office" messages may also lead to your removal from the list. You can manage your subscription options, including joining or leaving the list here: http://aomlists.pace.edu/scripts/wa.exe?SUBED1=entrep&A=1 If you have questions or need help, please contact Dr. John Bunch jbunch@benedictine.edu. Ventures HO!

Miles of Smiles,

Curt

Dr. Curtis L. DeBerg

College of Business

California State University, Chico

Chico, CA 95929-0011

530-898-4824 (phone)

cdeberg@csuchico.edu

Skype: cdeberg

Founder, SAGEGLOBAL (http://sageglobal.org)

Dear Pablo;

Thanks for sharing this.  In my experience of being involved in three start-ups and working in industry as a professional engineer for over a decade before joining academia, entrepreneurship takes building bridges to other disciplines and drawing on people whose skills complement one's own.  To learn it if it doesn't come naturally, takes being mentored on specific projects.  Being an entrepreneur isn't theoretical or academic.  All academic disciplines would do better to teach and learn how to cross academic boundaries in meaningful ways.  That means working with technical experts and practitioners, as well as business and policy experts.  Many of us do this in quiet ways, but it is often not recognized or rewarded in traditional academic departments.  .  We hire and promote our own and those that publish in the journals that we value.  Instead, it is 'how many articles have you published this year?'  Even those of us that study innnovation and entrepreneurship rarely cross these boundaries. 

I had an opportunity to study a top business school a couple of years ago to see what collaborations they had with academics outside of their own school.  In a large faculty of over 100, there were two of them working with other academic departments.  The engineering department in the university couldn't even get the Business faculty to teach the engineering innovation courses because of the salary/tuition disparity.  It simply wasn't worth it to the Business faculty to teach and mentor non-business majors.  It was clear to me that while they talked about wanting to promote interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation, they didn't practice it. 

I am not trying to single out Business programs.  They do a better job than most in looking out to the problems of business and the economy.  Business schools have much to contribute from their knowledge and understanding of entrepreneurship.  However, they are less likely to help practitioners that are busy starting businesses (rather than aspiring to study them) unless they learn to meet them where they are.  I think that this is one of the reasons that universities seem to hire business professionals and entrepreneurs to teach entrepreneurship, whether they have PhDs or not.  It is hard to find the skills internally.

There are excellent models of educational programs that teach skills and practice to their students.  Many of these programs are in community colleges and trade schools.  There are also models of university faculty and programs doing the right things.  We are going to have to figure out how to promote and value these.  With the way that the technology and educational needs are changing, we are going to have to figure out how to model the complex and collaborative world that we study if we expect to continue to be recognized as knowledge leaders. 

Kindest regards,
Beth-Anne


Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech, P.Eng, MBA, PhD
Director of Manufacturing Innovation and Policy, Ohio Manufacturing Institute
Assistant Professor, The John Glenn School of Public Affairs
The Ohio State University
250B Page Hall
1810 College Road
Columbus, OH, 43210
614.456.7629
schuelke-leech.1@osu.edu

This is a virtuous cycle: Entrepreneurs manifest their ideas by inspiring others' imagination, including those who join the effort, fund the venture, and purchase the products. This model is relevant to startups and established firms, as well as innovators of all types where the realization of a new idea - whether a product, service, or work of art - results in a collective increase in imagination, creativity, and entrepreneurship.

This framework allows us to parse the pathway, describing the actions and attitudes required at each step along the way.

• Imagination requires engagement and the ability to envision alternatives.
• Creativity requires motivation and experimentation to address challenges.
• Innovation requires focusing and reframing to generate unique solutions.
• Entrepreneurship requires persistence and the ability to inspire others.

Dear colleagues,

My sense is that we are viewing these questions from two different perspectives-one that is theoretical and the other that is practitioner-oriented.  These issues would be more easily resolved if we discussed to which perspective we hoped to contribute.  For example, the issue regarding nomenclature is rarely a problem when we are hoping to make a theoretical contribution because the terms come directly from the theory. Because practitioners often are less concerned with theory, they tend to borrow terms at their convenience. The terms used to extend theory come from the theory itself.  Otherwise, as Colin Cammerer suggested in the late 1980s, our research would accumulate instead of cumulating into a better understanding.  However, I am persuaded that the dichotomy between research and practice does not need to pose a false choice.  Don't we say that good theory is the most practical thing of all?

Also, I agree with Chuck that these debates are not as new as they are sometimes described as being.  After thinking about these same issues for the last half of the 1980s and the entire 1990s, I published a pair of JBV articles on theory and pedagogy.

Fiet, J.O. 2001.  The theoretical side of teaching entrepreneurship.  Journal of Business Venturing, 16: 1-24.

Fiet, J.O. 2001.  The pedagogical side of entrepreneurship theory.  Journal of Business Venturing, 16: 101-117.

Happy New Year,

Jim Fiet

On Dec 31, 2014, at 5:53 PM, Thiago de Carvalho <thiagodecarvalhobr@GMAIL.COM> wrote:

Dear Charles,

Both yours and Martin's statements can be denied, and then sustained, and denied again (in a never ending loop).

Eg. 4 types or learning - why not 6, 2 or 16?  What's the problem with having a personal definition for entrepreneurship? Is his opinion worth less just because the University he's working at hadn't won a prize?

His piece was published in a practitioner outlet, and considering the lack of discussion in such media, I saw it with good eyes.

However, this is just my opinion (no one needs to agree). It's like arguing against/in favor of my favorite color.

Thanks for your thoughtful analysis. It added a lot to the debate.

Kind Regards,

Thiago de Carvalho

 

2014-12-30 15:44 GMT-05:00 Charles Hofer <chofer@kennesaw.edu>:

All,

Pablo Martin de Holan's recent article on "The Bitter Truth about Entrepreneurial Success" contains too few real "Truths" to have attracted the attention that it has – although the debate that it has sparked may help clarify some issues related to the field of Entrepreneurship.

Before addressing these, though, let's look at four of the assertions that de Holan makes

First, de Holan asserts that "entrepreneurship research and education has exploded since the internet bubble made start-ups a beacon of light for ambitious youngsters."   Perhaps this timing is true in Europe, but de Holan is at least a decade late for the U.S. and has also focused on the wrong cause(s).  Entrepreneurship started to bloom in the U.S. in the early 1990s and was driven by several factors other than the internet bubble, which would not even begin for another 5+ years.  Among these other factors were (1) the development of entrepreneurship curricula by myriad schools of business; (2) a strong emphasis on entrepreneurship by the Academy of Management and the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE), the two major academic organizations supporting entrepreneurship research and teaching in the U.S.; (3) the development of several major national and international business plan competitions; and (4) most importantly, a major change in U.S. federal law that allowed U.S. universities to commercialize the research that their faculty had done which had been funded by U.S. government grants.  Thus, USASBE began giving awards for the "Outstanding Undergraduate and MBA Programs in Entrepreneurship" in 1991 and in 1997 added another for Outstanding PhD Programs in Entrepreneurship.  There were at least two to three finalists for each such Award, as well as over a half dozen or more applicants – all of whom had complete curricula of three to five (or more) entrepreneurship courses, not just one as de Holan implies.  And, in these courses, students developed business plans for new ventures which they proposed to start.  They then took these plans to the various major business plan competitions mentioned above, including Texas' Moot Corp Competition, which went international in 1989; San Diego State's Venture Challenge, which was started in 1991; the Georgia Bowl, which was started in 1992; and Nebraska's New Venture Competition, which was started in 1994. In addition, in most cases, the winning teams' plans were based on technologies that had become available at their respective universities because of the changes that had been made in the federal law noted above.  Two of the first of these ventures were the University of Texas team that won the 1992 Moot Corp Competition and the University of Georgia team that won the 1994 Nebraska Competition.  Moreover, neither teams' plan involved the internet – de Holan's proposed cause for the boom in entrepreneurship education.  Instead, both plans involved the commercialization of new health care technologies that were developed by different Texas and Georgia faculty members supported by federal grants.

Second, de Holan's notes that "becoming an entrepreneur is immensely difficult, so much so that the oddity is when a start-up survives, not when it fails."  It is true that entrepreneurship requires a lot of effort and is not easy.  But it is not "immensely difficult" either.  Thus, the historical start-up success rate in the U.S. is that about 20% of all start-ups succeed, i.e., are still in business after 5 years.  This is not a great success rate, but 1 in 5 is not an "oddity" either.  In addition, in order to get the high returns that they require on their capital, VC's create funds that invest in many ventures (usually about 20).  Over 30% of these ventures (5 to 7) lose some or all of the capital invested in them, another 30+% (5 to 7) become marginally profitable, and a third 30+% (5 to 7) earn attractive returns.  The VC succeeds if just one of the ventures s/he funds becomes immensely successful, i.e., makes returns well in excess of 10 times the money invested in them.  However, while the VC "fails" on the 60+% of the ventures that "lose some or all of the funds invested in them" (30+%) and those that "breakeven" (30+%), and just gets by on the 30+% that "earn good returns," the founding entrepreneur succeeds on all of the latter ventures as well as on some of the 30+% of the "marginally profitable" ventures.  Put differently, the founding entrepreneur's success rate for such VC-backed new ventures is well over 40%, usually nearly 50%, and on occasion approaches or even exceeds 60% - none of which is an "oddity."  In short, de Holan's stated "facts" regarding start-up feasibility do not correspond to any real world data – ay least not in the U.S..

Third, de Holan also states that "Professors pretend that their students can be transformed into an "entrepreneurial leader" in a short MBA quarter shared with three other classes."  Once again, one must ask: "What universe does de Holan live in?"  At every major university that I know of that offers a major in Entrepreneurship – and this includes private schools such as Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, Columbia, and NYU, public schools such as the Georgia Institute of Technology, Kennesaw State University, and the University of Georgia, and others – one MUST take at three to five (or more) courses to major in a field, i.e., at least 35% to 50% of their electives and 20% to 25% of all of their courses.  Also, the first or second of these courses will almost always emphasize the "costs" of pursuing an entrepreneurial career – and encourage many to drop out of the "entrepreneurship" major if they are unwilling to bear these costs.

Fourth, de Holan states that "for the first time in the history of Harvard [his reference is to the Harvard Business School (HBS), not Harvard University], entrepreneurship became the most popular career choice a few years ago."  Unfortunately, de Holan did not clarify precisely what he means by "career choice."  Is it (1) the courses that one takes at the HBS; or is it (2) the career that one follows after graduation from HBS?  As it turns out, it doesn't matter because de Holan's wrong either way.  Let me address the latter option first.    One of the things that HBS does very well is to track its graduates and the careers they follow.  In this context, HBS has reported for decades that over 30% of its graduates have become successful entrepreneurs.  For instance, I got my MBA from HBA in 1965, almost a half century ago – which is slightly more than a "few years ago" – and almost 33% of my graduating class has pursued an "entrepreneurial career" – and the vast majority have done so very successfully.  Put differently, entrepreneurship as a post-graduation career path is not a new thing at HBS – a fact that "puts the lie" to at least one of de Holan's claims.  But what if one wants to focus only on the courses that one takes while attending the HBS MBA Program?  Here again, it depends on how one counts courses.  For instance, when I got my MBA, one of the most popular classes at HBS (over 15% of the class took it) was General Georges Doriot's "Manufacturing" course.  But "Manufacturing" was NOT a quarter class and it was not about manufacturing (i.e., production).  Rather it was a course in which one worked on a team basis on a specific project for the entire year.  And what were these projects?  In most instances, they were in depth analyses of specific opportunities that lead to the creation of new ventures designed to capitalize on the opportunity being analyzed.  That year, there was also a "small business" class that was more about "entrepreneurship" than "small business," as well as various "Independent Studies" in which one could examine specific issues in which one was interested.  In this context, two members of my MBA section used such Independent Studies to develop plans that they turned into successful new ventures almost immediately after graduation.  If one counts the "Manufacturing" class, the "Small Business" class and all of the various "Independent Studies" that focused on new venture creation, "entrepreneurship" was one of the most popular career choices at HBS in 1965.  And this was 50 years ago.  Thus, de Holan's assertion that "entrepreneurship became the most popular career choice a few years ago" is not an accurate statement – although it might be "technically true" if one restricts one's view solely to HBS courses that have "entrepreneurship" in their title.

Finally, what is de Holan's BIG conclusion about Entrepreneurship?  It's that "It is not a science, it is not an art. It is ... a practice, and as a practice, only practice will make you better." Oh WOW!  How can I ever contain myself?

Apparently, de Holan has never learned something known by U.S. educators for nearly a century, namely that there are, in fact, four different types of learning. (1) The acquisition of facts about various topics. (2) The development of concepts and theories about different types of phenomena and how they work, (3) The development of skills in the application of such concepts and theories, and (4) The development and or modification of values about different types of situations.   The key point here is that different "teaching" methods are needed to "achieve" each of these different types of educational objectives.  It may be that lectures are an efficient, and perhaps even effective, way to communicate "facts."  Lectures are not the best way to develop skills in application, however.  So, what is?  The answer is simple: Practice!  More specifically, faculty supervised "guided practice" in the analysis of various situations in order to develop "skills in application."  This is, in fact, one of the major reasons for the use of the "case method" of teaching, which essentially provides students an opportunity to practice their analysis skills on the "real world" situations described in their cases.  As most readers realize, the "case method" is one of the primary teaching techniques used at HBS.  In fact, it is the underlying truth behind Charles Gragg's foundational 1940 article used to support the use of the case method, namely "Because Wisdom Can't Be Told"!

Having said this, one also needs to realize that the case method is only one of the ways that one can develop skills in application.   In the field of entrepreneurship, another option is the development of business models and/or business plans on a new venture that one might like to start.  If anyone would like to better appreciate this point, I strongly suggest that you attend one of the major national or international business plan competitions held in the U.S. and Canada every year.  These include (1) The Georgia Bowl, which is held in early February (this year the 6th and 7th) in Atlanta, GA, (this year at Georgia Tech); (2) The Cardinal Challenge, which is hosted by the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY, typically the third weekend of February; (3) The Nebraska New Venture competition, which is held in Lincoln, NE, typically the third week of March; (4) The Stu Clarke Competition, which is hosted by the University of Manitoba in Calgary, Manitoba, typically the last week of March; (5) The University of Oregon's New Venture Challenge, which is held in Portland, OR, the first week of April; (6) Rice University's Competition, which is typically held at Rice in Houston, TX. the second week of April, and (7) The Global Challenge of Venture Labs (formerly Moot Corp), which is usually held in Austin, TX, the first week of May.  Most of these competitions welcome guests.  Also, in the vast majority of these competitions, almost all of the finalists, including the winner, successfully start the ventures proposed by the teams involved.  Which is the key point of Gary Cadenhead's book – No Longer Moot (2002) – on the Venture Labs Competition.

Those interested in entrepreneurship education might also want to visit USASBE's website, which lists the various universities that have won its "Outstanding Model Program Awards" at both the undergraduate and MBA levels from 1991 onward.  Not only will you learn who has won, in many cases, there will be information on how to contact individuals at the winning schools in order to get more details about their "award winning" programs.  Alternately, feel free to contact me at cwhofer@hotmail.com since, as Past President of USASBE and one of those who helped Arnold Cooper and Karl Vesper co-found the Academy's Entrepreneurship Division, I have copies of much of this information.

One final point: To the best of my knowledge, E.M Lyon has never won the Global Challenge of Venture Labs, nor has it ever placed a team among the four Finalists, or among the Top 10

Sincerely,
Dr. Charles Hofer
Former President of USASBE & Former Chair of the Academy of Management's Business Policy and Strategy Division.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Colin Jones" <Colin.Jones@UTAS.EDU.AU>
To: ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2014 5:09:11 PM
Subject: Re: [ENTREP] The bitter truth about Entrepreneurship

Merry Christmas to all!

I spoke on this issue at the United Nations recently
You can hear my response here, http://vimeo.com/111947733
Hopefully a positive way for us all to move forward

Regards
Colin Jones

From: Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech <baschuelkeleech@HOTMAIL.COM<mailto:baschuelkeleech@HOTMAIL.COM>>
Reply-To: Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech <baschuelkeleech@HOTMAIL.COM<mailto:baschuelkeleech@HOTMAIL.COM>>
Date: Thursday, 25 December 2014 1:42 am
To: "ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU<mailto:ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>" <ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU<mailto:ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>>
Subject: Re: [ENTREP] The bitter truth about Entrepreneurship

Dear Pablo;

Thanks for sharing this.  In my experience of being involved in three start-ups and working in industry as a professional engineer for over a decade before joining academia, entrepreneurship takes building bridges to other disciplines and drawing on people whose skills complement one's own.  To learn it if it doesn't come naturally, takes being mentored on specific projects.  Being an entrepreneur isn't theoretical or academic.  All academic disciplines would do better to teach and learn how to cross academic boundaries in meaningful ways.  That means working with technical experts and practitioners, as well as business and policy experts.  Many of us do this in quiet ways, but it is often not recognized or rewarded in traditional academic departments.  .  We hire and promote our own and those that publish in the journals that we value.  Instead, it is 'how many articles have you published this year?'  Even those of us that study innnovation and entrepreneurship rarely cross these boundaries.

I had an opportunity to study a top business school a couple of years ago to see what collaborations they had with academics outside of their own school.  In a large faculty of over 100, there were two of them working with other academic departments.  The engineering department in the university couldn't even get the Business faculty to teach the engineering innovation courses because of the salary/tuition disparity.  It simply wasn't worth it to the Business faculty to teach and mentor non-business majors.  It was clear to me that while they talked about wanting to promote interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation, they didn't practice it.

I am not trying to single out Business programs.  They do a better job than most in looking out to the problems of business and the economy.  Business schools have much to contribute from their knowledge and understanding of entrepreneurship.  However, they are less likely to help practitioners that are busy starting businesses (rather than aspiring to study them) unless they learn to meet them where they are.  I think that this is one of the reasons that universities seem to hire business professionals and entrepreneurs to teach entrepreneurship, whether they have PhDs or not.  It is hard to find the skills internally.

There are excellent models of educational programs that teach skills and practice to their students.  Many of these programs are in community colleges and trade schools.  There are also models of university faculty and programs doing the right things.  We are going to have to figure out how to promote and value these.  With the way that the technology and educational needs are changing, we are going to have to figure out how to model the complex and collaborative world that we study if we expect to continue to be recognized as knowledge leaders.

Kindest regards,
Beth-Anne


Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech, P.Eng, MBA, PhD
Director of Manufacturing Innovation and Policy, Ohio Manufacturing Institute
Assistant Professor, The John Glenn School of Public Affairs
The Ohio State University
250B Page Hall
1810 College Road
Columbus, OH, 43210
614.456.7629
schuelke-leech.1@osu.edu<https://email.osu.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=jCNqmfIQ40WDfk2akWQwyPcW6nxoutAIxtaoFMCfjy12NsgUURnOLP3xSNsTBYN55IqqPDmKedQ.&URL=mailto%3aschuelke-leech.1%40osu.edu>


From:        Pablo MARTIN de HOLAN <pmdeh@INCAE.EDU<mailto:pmdeh@INCAE.EDU>>
To:        ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU<mailto:ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>,
Date:        2014/12/23 03:04 PM
Subject:        [ENTREP] The bitter truth about Entrepreneurship
Sent by:        Entrepreneurship Division Listserv <ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU<mailto:ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>>
________________________________



Dear all,

The Financial Times offered me the opportunity to comment on the state of Entrepreneurship education, and here is what I wrote in 900 words or less: "Business schools are not serving entrepreneurs (...) They assume that learning how to build, tune and decorate a piano will automatically make you a good pianist. (...) That is the role of a business school: to act as a safe place, a sandbox where entrepreneurs can hone their skills and develop new ones, meet other entrepreneurs and investors, but especially, minimise the cost of their mistakes and decide if the exciting life of the entrepreneur is for them and their families."


As you will see, the article is not subtle but it addresses a deep flaw in the way that some institutions (repeat: some) teach Entrepreneurship. Happy to engage in an Academic debate with you all around this, but please let´s not start a contest on who teaches better: the objective was not to point out at "good" and "bad" schools, but to discuss how to serve better the entrepreneurial ecosystem around our Universities and Business Schools

Find it here

http://tinyurl.com/FT-Bitter-Truth

And of course, happy holidays!

Pablo MARTIN de HOLAN

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Ventures HO!

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************************************** This message is from ENTREP which is sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management. Please do not post messages with attached files. Commercial messages or spammed messages are not allowed on the list. The use of auto-responder "out-of-office" messages may also lead to your removal from the list. You can manage your subscription options, including joining or leaving the list here: http://aomlists.pace.edu/scripts/wa.exe?SUBED1=entrep&A=1 If you have questions or need help, please contact Dr. John Bunch jbunch@benedictine.edu<mailto:jbunch@benedictine.edu>. Ventures HO!


University of Tasmania Electronic Communications Policy (December, 2014).
This email is confidential, and is for the intended recipient only. Access, disclosure, copying, distribution, or reliance on any of it by anyone outside the intended recipient organisation is prohibited and may be a criminal offence. Please delete if obtained in error and email confirmation to the sender. The views expressed in this email are not necessarily the views of the University of Tasmania, unless clearly intended otherwise.

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This message is from ENTREP which is sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management.

Please do not post messages with attached files. Commercial messages or spammed messages are not allowed on the list.  The use of auto-responder "out-of-office" messages may also lead to your removal from the list.

You can manage your subscription options, including joining or leaving the list here:
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If you have questions or need help, please contact Dr. John Bunch  jbunch@benedictine.edu.

Ventures HO!

**************************************
This message is from ENTREP which is sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management.

Please do not post messages with attached files. Commercial messages or spammed messages are not allowed on the list.  The use of auto-responder "out-of-office" messages may also lead to your removal from the list.

You can manage your subscription options, including joining or leaving the list here:
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If you have questions or need help, please contact Dr. John Bunch  jbunch@benedictine.edu.

Ventures HO!

--

Thiago de Carvalho  

************************************** This message is from ENTREP which is sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management. Please do not post messages with attached files. Commercial messages or spammed messages are not allowed on the list. The use of auto-responder "out-of-office" messages may also lead to your removal from the list. You can manage your subscription options, including joining or leaving the list here: http://aomlists.pace.edu/scripts/wa.exe?SUBED1=entrep&A=1 If you have questions or need help, please contact Dr. John Bunch jbunch@benedictine.edu. Ventures HO!

************************************** This message is from ENTREP which is sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management. Please do not post messages with attached files. Commercial messages or spammed messages are not allowed on the list. The use of auto-responder "out-of-office" messages may also lead to your removal from the list. You can manage your subscription options, including joining or leaving the list here: http://aomlists.pace.edu/scripts/wa.exe?SUBED1=entrep&A=1 If you have questions or need help, please contact Dr. John Bunch jbunch@benedictine.edu. Ventures HO!

María-Teresa Lepeley

My sense is that we are viewing these questions from two different perspectives-one that is theoretical and the other that is practitioner-oriented.  These issues would be more easily resolved if we discussed to which perspective we hoped to contribute.  For example, the issue regarding nomenclature is rarely a problem when we are hoping to make a theoretical contribution because the terms come directly from the theory. Because practitioners often are less concerned with theory, they tend to borrow terms at their convenience. The terms used to extend theory come from the theory itself.  Otherwise, as Colin Cammerer suggested in the late 1980s, our research would accumulate instead of cumulating into a better understanding.  However, I am persuaded that the dichotomy between research and practice does not need to pose a false choice.  Don't we say that good theory is the most practical thing of all?

Also, I agree with Chuck that these debates are not as new as they are sometimes described as being.  After thinking about these same issues for the last half of the 1980s and the entire 1990s, I published a pair of JBV articles on theory and pedagogy.

            Fiet, J.O. 2001.  The theoretical side of teaching entrepreneurship.  Journal of Business Venturing, 16: 1-24.

            Fiet, J.O. 2001.  The pedagogical side of entrepreneurship theory.  Journal of Business Venturing, 16: 101-117.

Happy New Year,

Jim Fiet

On Dec 31, 2014, at 5:53 PM, Thiago de Carvalho <thiagodecarvalhobr@GMAIL.COM> wrote:

 

Dear Charles,

 

Both yours and Martin's statements can be denied, and then sustained, and denied again (in a never ending loop).

 

Eg. 4 types or learning - why not 6, 2 or 16?  What's the problem with having a personal definition for entrepreneurship? Is his opinion worth less just because the University he's working at hadn't won a prize?

 

His piece was published in a practitioner outlet, and considering the lack of discussion in such media, I saw it with good eyes.

 

However, this is just my opinion (no one needs to agree). It's like arguing against/in favor of my favorite color.

 

Thanks for your thoughtful analysis. It added a lot to the debate.

 

Kind Regards,

 

Thiago de Carvalho

 

 

 

 

 

2014-12-30 15:44 GMT-05:00 Charles Hofer <chofer@kennesaw.edu>:

All,

Pablo Martin de Holan's recent article on "The Bitter Truth about Entrepreneurial Success" contains too few real "Truths" to have attracted the attention that it has – although the debate that it has sparked may help clarify some issues related to the field of Entrepreneurship.

Before addressing these, though, let's look at four of the assertions that de Holan makes

First, de Holan asserts that "entrepreneurship research and education has exploded since the internet bubble made start-ups a beacon of light for ambitious youngsters."   Perhaps this timing is true in Europe, but de Holan is at least a decade late for the U.S. and has also focused on the wrong cause(s).  Entrepreneurship started to bloom in the U.S. in the early 1990s and was driven by several factors other than the internet bubble, which would not even begin for another 5+ years.  Among these other factors were (1) the development of entrepreneurship curricula by myriad schools of business; (2) a strong emphasis on entrepreneurship by the Academy of Management and the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE), the two major academic organizations supporting entrepreneurship research and teaching in the U.S.; (3) the development of several major national and international business plan competitions; and (4) most importantly, a major change in U.S. federal law that allowed U.S. universities to commercialize the research that their faculty had done which had been funded by U.S. government grants.  Thus, USASBE began giving awards for the "Outstanding Undergraduate and MBA Programs in Entrepreneurship" in 1991 and in 1997 added another for Outstanding PhD Programs in Entrepreneurship.  There were at least two to three finalists for each such Award, as well as over a half dozen or more applicants – all of whom had complete curricula of three to five (or more) entrepreneurship courses, not just one as de Holan implies.  And, in these courses, students developed business plans for new ventures which they proposed to start.  They then took these plans to the various major business plan competitions mentioned above, including Texas' Moot Corp Competition, which went international in 1989; San Diego State's Venture Challenge, which was started in 1991; the Georgia Bowl, which was started in 1992; and Nebraska's New Venture Competition, which was started in 1994. In addition, in most cases, the winning teams' plans were based on technologies that had become available at their respective universities because of the changes that had been made in the federal law noted above.  Two of the first of these ventures were the University of Texas team that won the 1992 Moot Corp Competition and the University of Georgia team that won the 1994 Nebraska Competition.  Moreover, neither teams' plan involved the internet – de Holan's proposed cause for the boom in entrepreneurship education.  Instead, both plans involved the commercialization of new health care technologies that were developed by different Texas and Georgia faculty members supported by federal grants.

Second, de Holan's notes that "becoming an entrepreneur is immensely difficult, so much so that the oddity is when a start-up survives, not when it fails."  It is true that entrepreneurship requires a lot of effort and is not easy.  But it is not "immensely difficult" either.  Thus, the historical start-up success rate in the U.S. is that about 20% of all start-ups succeed, i.e., are still in business after 5 years.  This is not a great success rate, but 1 in 5 is not an "oddity" either.  In addition, in order to get the high returns that they require on their capital, VC's create funds that invest in many ventures (usually about 20).  Over 30% of these ventures (5 to 7) lose some or all of the capital invested in them, another 30+% (5 to 7) become marginally profitable, and a third 30+% (5 to 7) earn attractive returns.  The VC succeeds if just one of the ventures s/he funds becomes immensely successful, i.e., makes returns well in excess of 10 times the money invested in them.  However, while the VC "fails" on the 60+% of the ventures that "lose some or all of the funds invested in them" (30+%) and those that "breakeven" (30+%), and just gets by on the 30+% that "earn good returns," the founding entrepreneur succeeds on all of the latter ventures as well as on some of the 30+% of the "marginally profitable" ventures.  Put differently, the founding entrepreneur's success rate for such VC-backed new ventures is well over 40%, usually nearly 50%, and on occasion approaches or even exceeds 60% - none of which is an "oddity."  In short, de Holan's stated "facts" regarding start-up feasibility do not correspond to any real world data – ay least not in the U.S..

Third, de Holan also states that "Professors pretend that their students can be transformed into an "entrepreneurial leader" in a short MBA quarter shared with three other classes."  Once again, one must ask: "What universe does de Holan live in?"  At every major university that I know of that offers a major in Entrepreneurship – and this includes private schools such as Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, Columbia, and NYU, public schools such as the Georgia Institute of Technology, Kennesaw State University, and the University of Georgia, and others – one MUST take at three to five (or more) courses to major in a field, i.e., at least 35% to 50% of their electives and 20% to 25% of all of their courses.  Also, the first or second of these courses will almost always emphasize the "costs" of pursuing an entrepreneurial career – and encourage many to drop out of the "entrepreneurship" major if they are unwilling to bear these costs.

Fourth, de Holan states that "for the first time in the history of Harvard [his reference is to the Harvard Business School (HBS), not Harvard University], entrepreneurship became the most popular career choice a few years ago."  Unfortunately, de Holan did not clarify precisely what he means by "career choice."  Is it (1) the courses that one takes at the HBS; or is it (2) the career that one follows after graduation from HBS?  As it turns out, it doesn't matter because de Holan's wrong either way.  Let me address the latter option first.    One of the things that HBS does very well is to track its graduates and the careers they follow.  In this context, HBS has reported for decades that over 30% of its graduates have become successful entrepreneurs.  For instance, I got my MBA from HBA in 1965, almost a half century ago – which is slightly more than a "few years ago" – and almost 33% of my graduating class has pursued an "entrepreneurial career" – and the vast majority have done so very successfully.  Put differently, entrepreneurship as a post-graduation career path is not a new thing at HBS – a fact that "puts the lie" to at least one of de Holan's claims.  But what if one wants to focus only on the courses that one takes while attending the HBS MBA Program?  Here again, it depends on how one counts courses.  For instance, when I got my MBA, one of the most popular classes at HBS (over 15% of the class took it) was General Georges Doriot's "Manufacturing" course.  But "Manufacturing" was NOT a quarter class and it was not about manufacturing (i.e., production).  Rather it was a course in which one worked on a team basis on a specific project for the entire year.  And what were these projects?  In most instances, they were in depth analyses of specific opportunities that lead to the creation of new ventures designed to capitalize on the opportunity being analyzed.  That year, there was also a "small business" class that was more about "entrepreneurship" than "small business," as well as various "Independent Studies" in which one could examine specific issues in which one was interested.  In this context, two members of my MBA section used such Independent Studies to develop plans that they turned into successful new ventures almost immediately after graduation.  If one counts the "Manufacturing" class, the "Small Business" class and all of the various "Independent Studies" that focused on new venture creation, "entrepreneurship" was one of the most popular career choices at HBS in 1965.  And this was 50 years ago.  Thus, de Holan's assertion that "entrepreneurship became the most popular career choice a few years ago" is not an accurate statement – although it might be "technically true" if one restricts one's view solely to HBS courses that have "entrepreneurship" in their title.

Finally, what is de Holan's BIG conclusion about Entrepreneurship?  It's that "It is not a science, it is not an art. It is ... a practice, and as a practice, only practice will make you better." Oh WOW!  How can I ever contain myself?

Apparently, de Holan has never learned something known by U.S. educators for nearly a century, namely that there are, in fact, four different types of learning. (1) The acquisition of facts about various topics. (2) The development of concepts and theories about different types of phenomena and how they work, (3) The development of skills in the application of such concepts and theories, and (4) The development and or modification of values about different types of situations.   The key point here is that different "teaching" methods are needed to "achieve" each of these different types of educational objectives.  It may be that lectures are an efficient, and perhaps even effective, way to communicate "facts."  Lectures are not the best way to develop skills in application, however.  So, what is?  The answer is simple: Practice!  More specifically, faculty supervised "guided practice" in the analysis of various situations in order to develop "skills in application."  This is, in fact, one of the major reasons for the use of the "case method" of teaching, which essentially provides students an opportunity to practice their analysis skills on the "real world" situations described in their cases.  As most readers realize, the "case method" is one of the primary teaching techniques used at HBS.  In fact, it is the underlying truth behind Charles Gragg's foundational 1940 article used to support the use of the case method, namely "Because Wisdom Can't Be Told"!

Having said this, one also needs to realize that the case method is only one of the ways that one can develop skills in application.   In the field of entrepreneurship, another option is the development of business models and/or business plans on a new venture that one might like to start.  If anyone would like to better appreciate this point, I strongly suggest that you attend one of the major national or international business plan competitions held in the U.S. and Canada every year.  These include (1) The Georgia Bowl, which is held in early February (this year the 6th and 7th) in Atlanta, GA, (this year at Georgia Tech); (2) The Cardinal Challenge, which is hosted by the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY, typically the third weekend of February; (3) The Nebraska New Venture competition, which is held in Lincoln, NE, typically the third week of March; (4) The Stu Clarke Competition, which is hosted by the University of Manitoba in Calgary, Manitoba, typically the last week of March; (5) The University of Oregon's New Venture Challenge, which is held in Portland, OR, the first week of April; (6) Rice University's Competition, which is typically held at Rice in Houston, TX. the second week of April, and (7) The Global Challenge of Venture Labs (formerly Moot Corp), which is usually held in Austin, TX, the first week of May.  Most of these competitions welcome guests.  Also, in the vast majority of these competitions, almost all of the finalists, including the winner, successfully start the ventures proposed by the teams involved.  Which is the key point of Gary Cadenhead's book – No Longer Moot (2002) – on the Venture Labs Competition.

Those interested in entrepreneurship education might also want to visit USASBE's website, which lists the various universities that have won its "Outstanding Model Program Awards" at both the undergraduate and MBA levels from 1991 onward.  Not only will you learn who has won, in many cases, there will be information on how to contact individuals at the winning schools in order to get more details about their "award winning" programs.  Alternately, feel free to contact me at cwhofer@hotmail.com since, as Past President of USASBE and one of those who helped Arnold Cooper and Karl Vesper co-found the Academy's Entrepreneurship Division, I have copies of much of this information.

One final point: To the best of my knowledge, E.M Lyon has never won the Global Challenge of Venture Labs, nor has it ever placed a team among the four Finalists, or among the Top 10

Sincerely,
Dr. Charles Hofer
Former President of USASBE & Former Chair of the Academy of Management's Business Policy and Strategy Division.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Colin Jones" <Colin.Jones@UTAS.EDU.AU>
To: ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2014 5:09:11 PM
Subject: Re: [ENTREP] The bitter truth about Entrepreneurship

Merry Christmas to all!

I spoke on this issue at the United Nations recently
You can hear my response here, http://vimeo.com/111947733
Hopefully a positive way for us all to move forward

Regards
Colin Jones

From: Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech <baschuelkeleech@HOTMAIL.COM<mailto:baschuelkeleech@HOTMAIL.COM>>
Reply-To: Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech <baschuelkeleech@HOTMAIL.COM<mailto:baschuelkeleech@HOTMAIL.COM>>
Date: Thursday, 25 December 2014 1:42 am
To: "ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU<mailto:ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>" <ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU<mailto:ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>>
Subject: Re: [ENTREP] The bitter truth about Entrepreneurship

Dear Pablo;

Thanks for sharing this.  In my experience of being involved in three start-ups and working in industry as a professional engineer for over a decade before joining academia, entrepreneurship takes building bridges to other disciplines and drawing on people whose skills complement one's own.  To learn it if it doesn't come naturally, takes being mentored on specific projects.  Being an entrepreneur isn't theoretical or academic.  All academic disciplines would do better to teach and learn how to cross academic boundaries in meaningful ways.  That means working with technical experts and practitioners, as well as business and policy experts.  Many of us do this in quiet ways, but it is often not recognized or rewarded in traditional academic departments.  .  We hire and promote our own and those that publish in the journals that we value.  Instead, it is 'how many articles have you published this year?'  Even those of us that study innnovation and entrepreneurship rarely cross these boundaries.

I had an opportunity to study a top business school a couple of years ago to see what collaborations they had with academics outside of their own school.  In a large faculty of over 100, there were two of them working with other academic departments.  The engineering department in the university couldn't even get the Business faculty to teach the engineering innovation courses because of the salary/tuition disparity.  It simply wasn't worth it to the Business faculty to teach and mentor non-business majors.  It was clear to me that while they talked about wanting to promote interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation, they didn't practice it.

I am not trying to single out Business programs.  They do a better job than most in looking out to the problems of business and the economy.  Business schools have much to contribute from their knowledge and understanding of entrepreneurship.  However, they are less likely to help practitioners that are busy starting businesses (rather than aspiring to study them) unless they learn to meet them where they are.  I think that this is one of the reasons that universities seem to hire business professionals and entrepreneurs to teach entrepreneurship, whether they have PhDs or not.  It is hard to find the skills internally.

There are excellent models of educational programs that teach skills and practice to their students.  Many of these programs are in community colleges and trade schools.  There are also models of university faculty and programs doing the right things.  We are going to have to figure out how to promote and value these.  With the way that the technology and educational needs are changing, we are going to have to figure out how to model the complex and collaborative world that we study if we expect to continue to be recognized as knowledge leaders.

Kindest regards,
Beth-Anne


Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech, P.Eng, MBA, PhD
Director of Manufacturing Innovation and Policy, Ohio Manufacturing Institute
Assistant Professor, The John Glenn School of Public Affairs
The Ohio State University
250B Page Hall
1810 College Road
Columbus, OH, 43210
614.456.7629
schuelke-leech.1@osu.edu<https://email.osu.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=jCNqmfIQ40WDfk2akWQwyPcW6nxoutAIxtaoFMCfjy12NsgUURnOLP3xSNsTBYN55IqqPDmKedQ.&URL=mailto%3aschuelke-leech.1%40osu.edu>


From:        Pablo MARTIN de HOLAN <pmdeh@INCAE.EDU<mailto:pmdeh@INCAE.EDU>>
To:        ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU<mailto:ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>,
Date:        2014/12/23 03:04 PM
Subject:        [ENTREP] The bitter truth about Entrepreneurship
Sent by:        Entrepreneurship Division Listserv <ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU<mailto:ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU>>
________________________________



Dear all,

The Financial Times offered me the opportunity to comment on the state of Entrepreneurship education, and here is what I wrote in 900 words or less: "Business schools are not serving entrepreneurs (...) They assume that learning how to build, tune and decorate a piano will automatically make you a good pianist. (...) That is the role of a business school: to act as a safe place, a sandbox where entrepreneurs can hone their skills and develop new ones, meet other entrepreneurs and investors, but especially, minimise the cost of their mistakes and decide if the exciting life of the entrepreneur is for them and their families."


As you will see, the article is not subtle but it addresses a deep flaw in the way that some institutions (repeat: some) teach Entrepreneurship. Happy to engage in an Academic debate with you all around this, but please let´s not start a contest on who teaches better: the objective was not to point out at "good" and "bad" schools, but to discuss how to serve better the entrepreneurial ecosystem around our Universities and Business Schools

Find it here

http://tinyurl.com/FT-Bitter-Truth

And of course, happy holidays!

Pablo MARTIN de HOLAN

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--

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Hi Chuck, Hi Everybody,

I was not planning on replying to this thread after I started it, but I must say I got surprised by the angry tone of Chuck Hofer's remarks. I guess something I said must strike a sensitive chord to make Chuck lose his composure in public.  Call me naive, but I always get taken aback when people who disagree with me choose to take the ad-hominem route; when I took my rhetoric class almost 30 years ago (see, I am also that old), I was taught that personal attacks weaken the attacker's argument, look awful, and are bad style, but I guess not everybody agrees with that one.

I won't rehash my arguments with the exception the only point that truly matters: how easy or difficult is to start a successful firm. I say that being a successful entrepreneur is immensely difficult, and Chuck replies that 20% of startups are still in business after five years and then, in a remarkable feat of mental calisthenics, he begins talking about VCs and how they make money, as if this audience did not know what VCs were and as if making money as a VC somehow proved that Entrepreneurs made money too.

So let's start with the VCs, shall we?   For those interested in a detailed account of the abusive, exploitive side of the VC "ecosystem", take a look at this http://www.wired.com/2014/04/no-exit/ which also makes wonderful class material.  Beautiful ecosystem where a few eat and the rest are just food.  If anyone wishes to work that hard and for such a low expected value I am all for it, but the point is that operators want "ambitious youngsters" to base their choice on deception, and I do not like that very much.   And in spite of the "caveat emptor" argument, in the US and in most parts of the civilized world, a contract based on deception can have its validity challenged in court.

And now for the data on startup success. Chuck says that 20% of startups survive after 5 years, but as we all know, startup data has plenty of biases. And surviving is not success. And the plural of anecdote is not data. By the way, what is the median income / ROI of the 20% who "survived" after 5 years?  And when one divides that income by the number of hours put into the company, how much do you get?  Should we tell our students that "surviving" after five years can lead them to near-poverty?

We all know startup data is not very good, and when bad data is used to convince people to make significant life decisions I feel awful.  Let's examine what a respected scholar says about this type of data: "Due to its emergent, elusive and nebulous nature and the fact that firms not yet in existence do not appear in any sampling frames, researchers have largely been confined to exploring the phenomenon of new venture creation via survivor – biased samples and retrospective case studies. These conditions are obvious impediments to credible, scholarly knowledge development."   Here is the excellent -and recent paper by Per Davidsson and Scott Gordon, for those who dislike voodoo statistics: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/19622/1/c19622.pdf?origin=publication_detail

Still, the best data we have indicates that 20% survival is a gross overestimation of the real number of startups that succeed and that is after redefining success as survival, which is not the way Entrepreneurs themselves define success.  Not telling that to my students feel like a dereliction of my duty, but again, that is me.

Just to conclude, let me cite a reader's comment made on the FT website that some of you may have missed. It is from a recently graduated MBA student, who took the pain of personally thanking me through private emails, as did a large number of Entrepreneurs but again the plural of anecdote is not data so I won't use that argument here.

"At a top European B School, the professor in charge of the class dispensed pearls of wisdom such as "what matters is your passion and enthusiasm", "market studies are worthless", "if you do not try you will never know" and other truisms of the same caliber. It was the time of the social media / app bubble, and everybody and their dog was encouraged to launch an ebusiness.

It is only later that I understood this school had a portfolio mentality: they just did not care how many would fail, as long as one would succeed.When one guy in my cohort was semi-successful with an app, his story was put on the website and youtube, and he was invited to speak to conferences as an "expert entrepreneur". The school of course let prospective clients believe that this guy was a good representative of their MBA class, which was of course extrapolating from a sample of one."

I would not have said it differently.

Finally, as for how to teach Entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurship is taught, well, let's say that I am very aware how this is done and here at EMLYON we do it very, very well: for example, we have been hosting the World Entrepreneurship Forum for five years now, and we are a world reference on teaching Design Thinking and Effectuation.  However, I will not use the argument of authority to make my point, because I believe it is bad rhetoric and bad manners.   Those interested will look at the things I have done in the past, which are, incidentally, one of the reasons why FT thought my opinion was legitimate. And even if I hadn't done anything noteworthy, I would expect this forum to be a safe place where ideas were debated independently of who had them because, as we all know, stupid people sometimes said clever things and Harvard graduates also can be wrong.

Have a great Sunday!

Pablo Martin de Holan


On 2014-12-30 9:44 PM, Charles Hofer wrote:
> All,
>
> Pablo Martin de Holan's recent article on "The Bitter Truth about Entrepreneurial Success" contains too few real "Truths" to have attracted the attention that it has – although the debate that it has sparked may help clarify some issues related to the field of Entrepreneurship.
>
> Before addressing these, though, let's look at four of the assertions that de Holan makes
>
> Second, de Holan's notes that "becoming an entrepreneur is immensely difficult, so much so that the oddity is when a start-up survives, not when it fails."  It is true that entrepreneurship requires a lot of effort and is not easy.  But it is not "immensely difficult" either.  Thus, the historical start-up success rate in the U.S. is that about 20% of all start-ups succeed, i.e., are still in business after 5 years.  This is not a great success rate, but 1 in 5 is not an "oddity" either.  In addition, in order to get the high returns that they require on their capital, VC's create funds that invest in many ventures (usually about 20).  Over 30% of these ventures (5 to 7) lose some or all of the capital invested in them, another 30+% (5 to 7) become marginally profitable, and a third 30+% (5 to 7) earn attractive returns.  The VC succeeds if just one of the ventures s/he funds becomes immensely successful, i.e., makes returns well in excess of 10 times the money inves
> ted in them.  However, while the VC "fails" on the 60+% of the ventures that "lose some or all of the funds invested in them" (30+%) and those that "breakeven" (30+%), and just gets by on the 30+% that "earn good returns," the founding entrepreneur succeeds on all of the latter ventures as well as on some of the 30+% of the "marginally profitable" ventures.  Put differently, the founding entrepreneur's success rate for such VC-backed new ventures is well over 40%, usually nearly 50%, and on occasion approaches or even exceeds 60% - none of which is an "oddity."  In short, de Holan's stated "facts" regarding start-up feasibility do not correspond to any real world data – ay least not in the U.S..
>
>

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