Can entrepreneurship be taught?

Written on 05 February 2014

Yesterday, I attended an enterprise workshop, The F Word: The respectable face of failure? , organised in University of Warwick. It was a panel discussion by several distinguished guests. In the audience, there was a mixture of entrepreneurs, academics and consultants. A question was raised by an academic, "Can entrepreneurship be taught?".

The answer that I agree to the most is something along the line of "Entrepreneurship does not have to be taught through lectures, such workshop is part of teaching entrepreneurship". Yes, teaching and learning entrepreneurship does not have to be in the form of a degree or master's. Theories can be taught in classrooms but more can be learnt outside the building. So I believe that a combination of both is best in teaching and learning entrepreneurship. For instance, one can learn and work on his/her business model canvas "indoor" and Getting Out Of The Building (GOOB) to validate assumptions. The second part can be guided, but not really taught. Likewise, many things can be learnt online nowadays. However, if no actions were taken to apply those knowledge in the real world, entrepreneurship learning would not be effective.

Here's an interesting short (2 mins) video on a debate about this question by some leaders of startups. Listen to what Tim Tully said (1:27 to 1:55).

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqbAcdIRttE]

This is an interesting area to me because my professors are trying very hard to teach entrepreneurship but most students, though proclaimed to be entrepreneur-wannabe, aren't interested at all. What do you think is the best way to teach/learn entrepreneurship? How is entrepreneurship taught to you?