So, You Want To Be An Entrepreneur

Photo Courtesy of businessreviewcanada.ca

By: Christina Zha, Staff Writer

The entrepreneurial field is fast-paced and constantly innovating, so for young people starting out it may be a daunting task. Experience is an entrepreneur’s biggest asset, but how do you get your foot in the door and gain experience? Patricia Greene, the endowed chair of Babson College’s Entrepreneurship program, sat down with us to talk about the obstacles of starting a small business in a dominant corporate business environment and the importance of finding value when creating a new demand.

Professor Greene works at Babson College located in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The college offers a distinguished entrepreneurial program that was rated #1 by U.S. News & World Report, Bloomberg Business week, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Princeton Review among various other distinctions. As a professor and researcher, Professor Greene provides a long-term insight to an entrepreneurship career, from starting out as a student in an entrepreneurial program to graduating into the expanding world.

 What are the top qualities of an entrepreneur?

To be honest, that is the wrong question. Anybody can learn to be entrepreneurial. It’s not identifying anyone, oh you are an entrepreneur, I mean what does that really mean? It’s working on building on a mindset and a skillset to look at the world in a more entrepreneurial way and to be to be able to act and have the skillset.

There are skeptics who believe entrepreneurship can’t be taught, instead it’s a practical skill that can only be obtained through experience. What do you have to say about that?

Who are the skeptics? It goes back to the definition of entrepreneurship, for us and for any school they have to start with what do they mean when they say entrepreneurship. At Babson, we teach ability to understand opportunities, organize resources, and provide the leadership to create something of value.  That is a broad definition, but it’s a specific thing that you can teach.

What is the key to teaching entrepreneurship in your definition?

I think it’s an integration of theory and practice. Without theory, you are teaching opinion and war stories, basically I did it this way therefore you should do it that way. With theory, you have frameworks to help you identity the right questions and learn how to come up with answers. On the practice side, it’s about teaching entrepreneurship as a method, that you do get to dig in and try it and learn from doing at the same time.

For example, what does a curriculum look like? 

It’s very different in different places. The more traditional are the business planning type of classes that are more focused on the business start-up. At Babson, we do focus on all different kinds of entrepreneurship. Every single freshman at Babson starts their own business in their very first year. At most school, it’s done in the last year. For us it’s because you get to identify what is the point of this, and you get a referral point the whole time that you are there. You can go back and say when we started our business, we did it “this” and I have since learned it should have been “that.” Or “Oh my word, I remember what it was felt like, when our products was stuck in a custom in China.” It provides a foundation for learning that is very, very different.

In a classroom setting, how do students learn the important skills? How are students tested?

It’s interesting that testing becomes an important part of this. In order to be at an accredited business school, you have to be able to demonstrate proof of learning and we had to dig down and answer those questions. You are right it’s hard, but we came up with measurements of how to test the skills to identity opportunities.  And we test sometimes through cases, sometimes through simulations. We look for unique ways to be able to say yes this is what we think you should be able to do in order to be entrepreneurial and here is how to test it. We have done that with all different aspects of tasks and skills to be entrepreneurial in order to demonstrate you can teach it and this is how you can do it.

Compare to going to a traditional college program, what do you think are the benefits of studying an entrepreneur program?

There are only about 18, 346 big businesses in United States. And there are 28 millions businesses in the United States. If we just focus on United States, which is a challenge to begin with, over half of the work force in US works in small and medium businesses. I would flip it and say the challenge is all that we teach is about big businesses. Less than 1 per cent are big businesses, so what people actually do to earn a living is more likely with small and medium businesses, [so] why isn’t that the traditional way of teaching and learning?

What do you think would make a good student for an entrepreneurial program?

Someone who is interested in creating values that they get to decide which values they want to create. Whether it’s for themselves to make money or for a new way to solve a community problem. If you read all the global ways entrepreneurship is being used, it’s really being use to create value and be problem solvers whether it’s about economic development or environment. Most people who are interested in solving big problems realize it has to be done through entrepreneurship.

Would you say you wouldn’t have to be a businessman after graduating an entrepreneur program?

I definitely would say you don’t have to be a businessman. It’s different with different people. At Babson, we have a lot of people who come to us who are already being entrepreneurial. We help them learn and hone tasks and skills. Some of them will go on to work for others first, in fact I think it’s actually good to work for others first. Learn how businesses work, so you can decide how you don’t want yours to work in some way and how you do in other. Build your network, make some money, gather some resources and then start some your own business or whatever you want to be. For others, they want to dive in right away. It’s very personal and individual decision to what you do next.

What do you think are the big challenges for startup entrepreneur? How do you think the education system help alleviate these challenges?

Two different things: I think one of the biggest challenge is that our country is the educational system, the policies and regulations are all constructed to support big businesses. So it’s learning how to navigate systems that aren’t created to be navigated by small businesses. That’s a huge challenge because if you think about it every attorney, every accountant, every banker have gone through an educational system that is focused on large corporations. You have to be careful that you even find profession services that understand how to start a small business. I think that’s a huge obstacle. Same for policies.  Policies are made for large businesses and then you have to figure out what the implications are for small and medium businesses. If we go back to the numbers 99 per cent of businesses are small and medium, I like to suggest we flip to default and govern for the small and medium and figure out what it means for the large.

How do you think the educational system will help alleviate these challenges?  

I think the educational system usually makes it worst. I think we need to change the education system so that professors teach about a small business environment as much about a corporate environment. We need more researches on small and medium businesses because that is most of the businesses in the workforce and half the assets are in small and medium size businesses.

Do you think there is a far way to go in terms of research and articles to teach students?

I think it’s coming along very nicely. There is a good body of research in the entrepreneurship field. Personally, I would like to see it spread across the other business disciplines.

Can you give an example of the other business disciplines you are thinking of?

Sure! Human resources, what does it take for a small business to hire someone? Marketing, what do you do when you can’t call down the hall to the marketing department? Economics, how many people actually understand that large businesses are less than 1 per cent of the businesses in the United States. It’s almost everything that is done in business needs to be thought of in a different way. This is not my original statement but small businesses are not mini-me’s of large businesses, they are different.

We’ve been talking about education in entrepreneurship. Now I have a few questions on what happens after students graduate. How do you think entrepreneurial programs prepare students for the expanding world?

It’s a really good question. I think it varies greatly by program. A little earlier, I said a lot of programs strictly teach by a business plan method. I think that can be expanded upon, I think if people stop thinking about entrepreneur as a type of person, am I one or am I not. What does that mean? For example, if you take Michael Dell, Michael Dell was an entrepreneurial when he started Dell. Is he still an entrepreneur? He runs a large company, is he still an entrepreneur? Or when did he stop? How do you decide that type of thing? But when you can identity what the tasks and skills are for an entrepreneur that you can do.

I think the good [programs] recognize that it’s about creating values and creating new demands. I think it helps people think about what’s possible, how can I make what I think is possible actually happen?

What do you think is the relationship between city size and a start of business?

That is a critical question. There is a contradiction; in some ways small cities need it most because what other options do they have? The old school “let’s recruit a big business to come here,” it’s ludicrous. All that gets is big companies moving from city to city. It doesn’t play to a national strength to begin with. What we often hear from people who live in small cities is that they want to find a way to create a job environment where the kids may go away for school but they can come back and have great and exciting and interesting careers and they want to live there. So for the small cities, it’s absolutely critical to figure those types of things out. For the big cities, there is a difference between what researchers call the Necessity Entrepreneurship, which is “I’m doing it because I don’t have any other choices, there are no jobs, I have to feed my kids” or what we call Opportunity Entrepreneurship which is “I have this idea, I always wanted to run my own company and I’m going to go for it.”  Those are very different things, but people have to be entrepreneurial to do either one.

Last question: I feel like you get this question a lot. As a research and professor, do you have any tips for a starting entrepreneur?

Yeah, do it (laughs). Do something. Test the waters. Partner and work with people, be collaborative, and learn about a lot of different type of things.  Curiosity is important, passion, persistence, those are the kind of thing that are most important in being entrepreneurial. Think intentionally about the values that you’d like to create.

Christina Zha studies Political Science and English at the University of Toronto. Recently, she made a switch to an Economics major. Christina is curious about people and ideas so she enjoys asking questions and listening.