10 Reasons Why Every Student Should Take an Entrepreneurship Course
Dr. Suresh U. Kumar, Serial Entrepreneur & Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
With the rapid acceleration and adoption of technological innovation, graduating college students face work environment characterized by intense global competition, easy access to information, and rapid change in customer behavior. To thrive in this dynamic, complex world, individuals and organizations must learn to think and act quickly to seize fleeting opportunities, learn on the run while making the rapid pivots that moves them forward. Leaders have to learn how to leverage the strength and diversity of teams, and master the art of storytelling. In other words, todays graduates have to be learn to cultivate a mindset very similar to that of an entrepreneur. Student who are not prepared for this new work environment will face a severe handicap.
My experiences designing and teaching experiential programs on innovation and entrepreneurship across multiple educational institutions, big and small, indicate that enrolling in a an entrepreneurship course positively affects students’ intentions to start a business and enhances self efficacy i.e. belief in their own abilities to launch a startup. In fact, entrepreneurship education enhanced many other life skills that go well beyond startup skills and will stand any student is good stead, regardless of where they work. This leads me to an intriguing thought: What if it was mandatory for every college student to take a course in entrepreneurship before they graduated?
Here are the “TOP 10” reasons why I believe that EVERY university student will benefit from taking at least one course on entrepreneurship that has an applied or experiential learning component:
1. Learning to uncover and evaluate opportunities by being curious and asking deeper questions
2. Learning by “doing” (experiential), as opposed to just “how” to do (theory). A good way to do this is to have students build a product from a idea based on a real life problem that have identified.
3. Understanding the working of the virtuous loop of agile innovation that involves Identifying an Idea/Opportunity, Building a MVP, Testing it with customers, Measuring results, and Iterative Improvement.
4. Acceptance of risk and uncertainty as givens and learning how to deal with and take advantage of them.
5. Reframing failure so as not to see it an obstacle, but as essential to advancing an idea (or career)
6. Practicing empathy which is at the heart of every successful leader and team
7. Appreciation of the long term value of building high-trust relationships
8. Learning how to work collaboratively with diverse groups of internal and external stakeholders (investors, co-founders, team members, customers, partners etc) all of who have different priorities
9. Practicing how to influence others by authentic communication and storytelling and by use of personal influence
10. Building grit, resilience, and confidence that is forged by repeatedly overcoming seemingly heavy odds (just taking an idea to a working prototype can boost confidence)
So how do we know that this works? While there is ample research evidence of the positive affects of entrepreneurship education, a note of caution is in order. We need to be mindful to apply the right set of metrics to measure student learning and progress. The fact is that the vast majority of educational institutions make the mistake of measuring success in the form of short term results such as number of startups launched, sales generated, or jobs created, etc, when in reality they are ill equipped to help students achieve any of these goals.
The more appropriate metrics of the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education should be the shift in the mindset of the students resulting from a specific learning experience. Although not easy to measure, an effective program or course should help move students towards being more curious, to be more open to trying new opportunities, more willing to test an idea, fail and learn from mistakes. This in itself will be a big WIN — not only for students and their future employers, but also for universities, families and the community at large.
