Dear Colleagues:
I have been following this email trail with great interest, in part because it is fascinating how 900 word articles in the FT (I did one as well last year, well 2013, with Tim Faley) can generate such passionate responses. In our piece (
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/483c4068-6a3e-11e2-a3db-00144feab49a.html#axzz3O05x8WAg), we argued that the focus in entrepreneurship education ought to be on building the skillsets, not on the outcome (the business), and that we needed to start treating entrepreneurship as a profession, not a lottery game driven by 'following your passion'.
That said though, and I have been teaching entrepreneurial business fundamentals for much shorter than many of you, I was once asked at an investment conference: "What qualifies you to teach entrepreneurship?". The implication of course is that if you haven't actually built a high value company (not a consultancy, or one-person business, but a Schumpeterian entrepreneurial firm), you don't understand the uncertainties. The theories and business model canvases are a 'non-messy' abstraction of reality.
One of my former econ profs used to say in his first lecture: "If you want to learn economics, get out in the real world and do something. If you want to learn about the principles and theories of microeconomics, you can stay. We can only explain about 10% of business outputs based on resource inputs. The rest is technology and decision variables.". As a student, I was happy to accept the limitations of what we can explain - I also didn't know better.
As I have for six years now built, resourced, and grown two financial IT companies (one more successful than the other), I have an appreciation both for the question I was asked years ago, and for what we can expect to achieve with teaching business fundamentals, business models and entrepreneurship theories of various stripes. Teaching theoretical frameworks and skills to assess and structure business concepts will help with 10% of the game. Not quite a lottery - I'll buy a ticket for Powerball any time if my chances of winning are 1 in 10.
The rest, indeed, is how the entrepreneur deals with the uncertainty of technology and decision variables of all kinds... But the decisions under uncertainty are not random, as those that ascribe success to luck would like to make us believe. Luck and serendipity are part of life. The skill is to have a framework in which one can recognize how luck and serendipity along the way can advance the vision of your business.
Thanks for reading...
Peter
| | Peter Adriaens, PhD PE BCEEM
Professor of Environmental Engineering & Finance; Professor of Entrepreneurship & Strategy (Ross School of Business), The University of Michigan - Ann Arbor |
On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 8:21 PM, John Bunch
<jbunch@benedictine.edu> wrote:
Subject: Re: [ENTREP] The bitter truth about Entrepreneurship
Date: January 3, 2015 at 2:15:02 PM EST
Dear colleagues,
At the beginning of every class I teach, I ask my students the following question: Which is more important theory or practical application? When I first started doing this more than 20 years ago, typically 80% of my students would argue that practical application was more important. For the last several years, the split is more like 60 to 65% for theory and 40 to 35% in favor of practical application. This trend has greatly surprised me. Still today, many students tell me that the only reason that they are in school is so that they can get a good job. After a brief discussion, in which I allow the students to argue freely for the value of practical application, to those who affirm that practical application is more important than theory, I reply that that is a reasonable theory that is testable, which always greatly surprises the students.
A second case on the same point, and this is a true story-there once was a very successful entrepreneur who did not think very much of academics, and he was not shy about telling them. At a conference that I attended, he told the attendees that next year, we ought to cancel the academic breakout sessions, so that we could all meet as one group so that he could proceed to tell us how things really were. Hum, I thought, yes, and if you can convince me that your success was not due to luck, I will listen to every word that you have to say.
The point is, one of the things that theorizing does better than any other known method is that it can provide a way to control for lucky outcomes. It can also explain the past and present, as well as predict the future. In fact, theory is all that we have to interpret these aspects of time and space. Of course, theory sometimes gets it right and at other times does not. Nevertheless, because I know of no rational alternative to theory, in my view we should be cautious about criticizing it too harshly, at least until we can perfect something else that is better.
To those who disagree about the value of theorizing, either inductive or deductive, I welcome the opportunity to learn about a better method. Thanks and have a great spring semester.
Respectfully,
Jim Fiet
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.
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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. Ventures HO!