Teaching Our Next Generation Of Entrepreneurs

The perception of entrepreneurial opportunities and the capacity to exploit them are strongly associated with social norms that encourage venturing, such as the availability of risk capital, access to developing technologies, a quality diverse entrepreneurship education system and a sound professional infrastructure. This has considerable implications for the UK entrepreneurial economy.

Entrepreneurship education, at all levels, could very effectively prepare and train students to start and manage new businesses. This type of education is strong and getting stronger in business schools across the country, but it needs to proliferate outside of the business domain. Very few students undertake business subjects, and not every business school student is required to or chooses to take up an entrepreneurship course. Thus the number of people exposed to higher-level entrepreneurship education is relatively small in the UK. It is critical therefore that entrepreneurship education is expanded.

Engineering and other technology graduates have the capability to generate innovations that may be the basis for high-growth companies. They need to learn techniques for discerning whether or not such innovations have commercial potential. As such, universities need to encourage the integration of their degree requirements between entrepreneurship/management and engineering/technology.

There are often many hurdles to such collaboration, however, including issues of funding; credit allocations; faculty teaching loads; scheduling conflicts, and the lack of available facilities. While a handful of schools are facing and overcoming these issues, there is a real need to see more active collaboration on university campuses.

There also needs to be a more concentrated effort to introduce entrepreneurship and basic economic principles at the primary and secondary levels. At the primary level, these concepts could be integrated throughout the curriculum. At the secondary level, entrepreneurship skills and basic economic principles could be offered as stand-alone courses. Many people enter the workforce without a college education and have no responsibility for exposure to entrepreneurship training.

While not every school graduate has the capacity or desire for higher education, almost everybody has the potential to start a new business. The average high school graduate may not start a fast-growth, high-technology company, but he or she can start a landscaping business, a retail business or some other venture that will employ other people and contribute to economic adaptation. As such, it is critical to provide at least the basic instruction to ensure that these future entrepreneurs have the understanding of and a certain level of proficiency in the skills necessary to implement and manage a business.

To avoid problems of duplication, various national experts recommend the establishment of a ‘clearinghouse’ for government programmes. A clearinghouse, perhaps web-based, could provide an efficient means for entrepreneurs to gain knowledge of specific programmes and to access those programmes.

In addition, there is also the need to simplify compliance pressures on entrepreneurial firms. Simplifying compliance requirements would improve entrepreneurial efficiency at the most critical times in the venture’s life. Many new ventures report having a difficult time staying on top of all the reporting requirements. Furthermore, reducing the required paperwork would reduce manpower constraints on new ventures, thereby increasing their chances of surviving the early years.

There is also a reported ‘Gap’ in Seed Stage Financing. If the gap exists, it may be more pronounced in different industries, different geographic regions, or for distinct groups of entrepreneurs. The substantial amount of funding provided through informal channels, orders of magnitude greater than that provided by formal venture capital investments and hitherto unknown and unappreciated, suggests some mechanisms for filling the gap may have developed without recognition.

There may not be a gap in the availability of such capital but, rather, in the entrepreneur’s knowledge of where it resides and how to tap it. Experts may be split over whether a gap exists in seed capital because of the fact that many entrepreneurs choose not to endure the time, cost and bureaucracy involved in the search and seizure of such capital.

Increasing the visibility of entrepreneurs by highlighting their story could prove to be an attractive method of encouraging others to pursue their own entrepreneurial opportunities. It reflects widespread acceptance of entrepreneurship as a career option in the UK.

In the absence of a more comprehensive, long-term research programme on the entrepreneurial process, government policies in the UK regarding new and growth companies will continue to fluctuate in reaction to political whims and pressures from special interest groups. It is essential, therefore, that an increased understanding of the principles underlying entrepreneurship is secured in order to ensure that a sustained growth in the entrepreneurial sector is secured.