Entrepreneurship - Nature or nurture?

But how do you become an entrepreneur – is it a natural ability and mindset or is it something that can be taught and nurtured? Is it a skill like public speaking, or a more diffuse capability like leadership?  Most educators would say that there are elements of both involved in entrepreneurship, and much more as well.  The challenge is to create an educational environment that can develop entrepreneurial capacity, and encourage entrepreneurial activity.

Entrepreneurship can be seen as a set of transferrable skills that apply across many - if not most - disciplines and professions. Bankers need to be entrepreneurial sometimes, or at least to understand the entrepreneurial mindset, especially when they are evaluating a loan or an investment in a new venture. Accountants need to think entrepreneurially sometimes, when they need to understand the assumptions and forecasts of a very lean venture.  Artists and musicians, athletes, clergy - people in all manner of professions need to understand how creativity, risk, and uncertainty affect their performance and create opportunities to enhance it.

People often ask if there is such a thing as an entrepreneurial personality - traits that indicate a higher likelihood of entrepreneurial success, or even failure. The short answer is No. There is no right or wrong way to be an entrepreneur, because launching new ventures is enormously dependent upon context: market demand factors, competitor responses, team dynamics, and blind luck all play a part in addition to the personality of the entrepreneur.  If anything, the role of a single person is often less important than these environmental dynamics.

So, does it follow that there is not much point in teaching entrepreneurship? No, because there is a great deal of value in teaching people how to interpret and understand the personal and contextual dynamics around them, in pointing out common mistakes to avoid, and in helping them to develop interpersonal and networking skills that will make it easier for them to access any necessary resources they might need as entrepreneurs. 

Many business schools have entrepreneurship on the curriculum but Saïd Business School takes a distinctive approach. For one thing, it is able to draw on the resources of the University of Oxford, one the world’s greatest universities. For 800 years ideas, technologies and intellectual property have emerged from Oxford’s wide-ranging research. Several institutes exist within the University and the Business School to teach, research and promote entrepreneurship. The Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society are just three examples that demonstrate the School’s ability to create an enabling environment for entrepreneurship far beyond simply teaching it as an academic subject. Saïd draws on Oxford’s academic expertise to explore the institutional underpinnings of innovation, examining business and technology in their social, economic and political contexts.

Because of this, entrepreneurship teaching at the Saïd Business School is distinctive as well.  It is not viewed as a standalone topic and entrepreneurial content is distributed implicitly and explicitly throughout many other courses. This allows students to develop entrepreneurial skills at the same time as they explore other business concepts. 

Oxford students seem well aware of this: about 90% of the most recent class of MBAs expressed some interest in learning about entrepreneurship. That learning extends beyond the classroom to project work, venture funding opportunities, networking societies (Oxford Entrepreneurs has over 7,000 members) and many opportunities to meet successful entrepreneurs and investors at the numerous events at the School.

In November Saïd hosted the 9th annual ‘Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford’ event. Entrepreneurs, investors, venture capitalists, students and the wider community gathered to explore the big issues and future directions of innovation and entrepreneurial phenomena in a mix of master-classes, tutorials, panel debates and networking events.  Speakers representing some of the leading-edge companies from Silicon Valley (Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In) made the trip to Oxford to explore a theme in depth; this year it was social networking. Some of Oxford’s most recent successful start-ups have grown out of connections made at this event one of which recently sold for £5 million.

About the author:

Pegram Harrison is Fellow in Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford