
Why Entrepreneurship Programs for Engineers Fail - betocmn
https://hbr.org/2018/05/why-entrepreneurship-programs-for-engineers-fail
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taneq
> Entrepreneurs are known for their creativity and risk tolerance; engineers,
> mathematicians, and health care workers typically aren’t.

Lost me in the first line:

1) The moment an engineer takes a risk and starts a company we stop calling
them an engineer and start calling them an entrepreneur. If your job title is
"engineer" then you by definition haven't taken that risk, but that doesn't
mean that a lot of entrepreneurs don't come from an engineering background. (I
believe the term hereabouts is 'technical co-founder'.)

2) Creativity is vital to engineering if you're building anything remotely new
or different. Just because the product of that creativity is useful doesn't
mean it isn't creative.

~~~
carlmr
Yeah, 100% agreed. Engineering and CS are way more creative than any business
school will ever understand. Obviously this article wasn't written by someone
who knows what he's talking about.

The risk profile might be a fair point. If you look at engineering and CS
salaries though, it's logical to take less risks. Because the low risk option
pays a lot more than in other fields. This makes any higher risk option
inherently less attractive.

~~~
humanrebar
There's risk in managing an engineering career, though you're correct that
there's a floor on that risk. Engineers, especially early in their careers,
need to manage their personal development. I often talk to developers that
have been writing terrible enterprise products for the same company for a
decade. They're typically underpaid and underqualified to find a better
position elsewhere.

One way to look at that is as poor risk management. Having marketable skills
is mitigating risk that the job pool will not be a good fit for your skills
next time you are looking for a job. Switching jobs periodically is generally
more risk than not, and it's basically required these days since market rates
for good software engineers grows a lot faster than employers are comfortable
with. Most business models do not survive 10%+ growth in payroll every year.

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spyckie2
Hidden behind an unfair title and a distractingly provocative first line is
actually a research paper, which the article also seems to brush off as not
really important either.

The research paper appears to have interviewed STEM entrepreneur programs
asking about their expectation vs reality for students to participate or enter
into entrepreneurial activities/careers.

After molding the programs to promote entrepreneurship heavily, the response
from the students to be entrepreneurs are underwhelming. The article posits
that the risk taking spirit of entrepreneurship is not easy to teach and
suggests to screen for it when accepting students. It also suggests curriculum
improvements - teach the logistics of how to start a company in one class, and
identifying entrepreneurial opportunities in another. Finally, it suggests
focusing on a few core classes rather than developing many broad classes.

The answer to the title is more on the lines of "because your program can be
run better" than it is "because STEM majors are less risk averse than normal",
as there's no solid evidence presented for the latter other than anecdotal
observation.

You can make the counter-argument that the entire population is risk averse,
not just STEM majors, and it's unknown whether or not STEM majors command a
statistically significant difference when compared to the normal population.

~~~
fergie
Its also reasonable to assume that staff and students who choose to _study_
entrepreneurship are less interested in actually _becoming_ entrepreneurs.

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montrose
Occam's Razor suggests the reason "entrepreneurship programs" for engineers
fail is not because engineers are too timid, but because all such programs
fail.

The way to learn how to start a startup is by doing it. So the right way to
teach "entrepreneurship," to the extent it can be taught, is something like Y
Combinator, not a college class.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
I am in two minds over this. I skipped college after one year and went
straight into an IT job as a sysadmin. Seven years later I started working for
a startup and then proceeded to do startups ever since.

There would have been a bunch of things that would have been very valuable to
learn in school to be a better entrepreneur, but I think I haven’t really seen
programmes that take the right approach. Successful entrepreneurs don’t
generally set out to be teachers. I don’t think I would enjoy it. Advising
startups, maybe that would be better. Which brings us to something like YC.

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rmason
Kind of amazing to me how history goes in cycles. When I started as an
entrepreneur in the nineties it was much easier for an MBA to raise venture
capital than an engineer. If by some chance a coder did raise money he'd be
replaced by an MBA the second he found a repeatable business model.

But after the crash the VC's figured out they got better results mentoring a
founding engineer to become a CEO than going the MBA route. Now for some
reason Harvard wants to reverse this trend? Doesn't make any sense at all to
me.

~~~
kchoudhu
Why would this be surprising? Harvard mints MBAs, and those MBAs donate money
to Harvard when they hit it big.

Obviously Harvard is going to do its level best to make sure its graduates
have the whip hand in industry.

~~~
QML
The starkest contrast between the CS building and the business school on
campus isn't the way students dress or the conversations they have -- its how
much their alumni donate. And let me say, CS does not match up in that regard.

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jadedhacker
Do you really want the people building your bridges to have the same attitude
as a FB executive? Move fast and break things indeed.

It's really not at all clear that entrepreneurial value creation is anything
other than finding ways to bilk people out of money while the sciences and
technical arts have a long tradition of slow methodical work that leads to
transformations in the underlying substrate of society.

Operationalizing these techniques is important, but let's say you trust in
markets to take obvious opportunities and run with them. The entrepreneurs are
essentially interchangeable parts, one of them will win. Much like how little
we care about whether one news organization is an hour ahead of another, do we
care that one company is slightly faster than another at cornering the market?
Not really, except as sport.

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neokantian
I do not think it is just engineers. Anybody raised for 15 years being told
what to work on by their teachers, is not easily going to set his own goals.
He has been conditioned to waiting for someone else to do that.

The ones more likely to overcome this bias, are students who have a close
relationship with an entrepreneurial parent or other role model. They may pick
up the mentality of setting their own goals.

Furthermore, their peers may not be entrepreneurial either.

They also need to get used to the idea that there rarely definite yes/no
answers to business questions. Real-life questions do not often come out of a
book.

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tlb
Although I have an engineering degree, I don't fit the stereotype described. I
only like to work on things where the outcome is uncertain.

I believe you can't change that characteristic of people much. Rather than
trying to teach people who aren't entrepreneurial to be entrepreneurial, it's
probably better to teach tech skills to entrepreneurial people.

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triviatise
Im skeptical that risk tolerance has much to do with entrepreneurship. I think
a better factor is the desire to do any crap boring job that needs to be done
even if you dont want to do it and to keep going in the face of setbacks and
failures.

I realized as a developer Im virtually 100% certain of solving any technical
problem. As a manager or an entrepreneur there are many problems, such as
people problems or market problems, where you simply cant solve it. Often
times you might have solved it but you cant be sure.

Also engineering has lots of fun purely intellectual logic and technical
problems to solve. Building a business has lots of pure grind problems that
dont take much intellectual horsepower but require lots of emotional fortitude
and the ability to constantly switch from boring task to boring task, or to do
the same boring task over and over.

Running payroll every two weeks, balancing books, opening mail, going to
networking meetings, kissing up to people, training people, interviewing
people, walking around and just talking to the team, talking to vendors,
reviewing customer/vendor/employee contracts etc etc.

With regard to failures. Here are some of mine: having a star performer leave,
laying people off during a recession at christmas, not being sure you can make
payroll, losing a big client, having to fire a good friend.

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seem_2211
Nothing more entertaining than hearing business professors tout
entrepreneurship when they've by and large spent their entire lives living and
working in bureaucratic institutions. Business theory and business practice
are a world apart. Look at these two authors for example, they wrote a good
article, but they've both been business school professors for 7 and 10 years
respectively.

That said, I had one lecturer who 'got it' and was the reason I studied
communications as an undergraduate. I believe he wrote the second half of the
course in the break between the semester halves (apparently lecturers are
supposed to do that about 1 year in advance). I learnt more from him than
almost every other business professor, mostly due to the fact he just didn't
really care about the bureaucracy of the management school (I believe he had
tenure). I asked him one day what he studied for his PhD and it turns out he
studied 19th Century Scottish Poetry.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised. The guy was a total liability from
every box you can check. But that's why he was good.

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tim333
>Blended entrepreneurial programs (BEPs) are attempting to answer this need by
merging university-level entrepreneurial education with discipline-focused
degrees in STEAM fields.

I was involved in some business education from the engineering department and
it was pretty bad. Mostly academics talking about so and so's theory of the
firm and no real business experience whatsoever.

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jonex
I thought they were talking about preparing engineers for starting companies.
In that analysis I think it makes sense that risk aversion is a factor,
although, considering the odds of 90% failure* that are often reported, I'm
not sure that we should talk about risk as much as lack of opportunity
seeking.

It's no surprise that many engineers, often looking forward to a prosperous
career, don't see a need to seek opportunities with relatively low chances for
an upside. This can't be compared to the fact that an engineer designing a
bridge has to be very careful.

Then I read the last line: "BEPs that successfully match students’
entrepreneurial attributes and development stand to help meet firms’
increasing demand for entrepreneurial graduates." And I'm no longer sure what
they mean, do they see entrepreneurship as just another MBA, but for risk
takers?

* Even if compensating for some factors can make this less, you are in general more likely to fail than succeed with starting a company.

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aaavl2821
I started an entrepreneurship program for life sci PhDs after seeing the
shortfalls of existing programs and agree with a few points of this, namely
that these programs should expose students to entrepreneurship but not force
it on them -- not everyone wants to do a startup, and that opportunity
recognition as a skill can be detached from entrepreneurship more broadly

However, at least in biotech a big reason for students disillusionment is that
the programs aren't that great -- if the teachers don't have experience
starting biotech companies, it's really hard to teach students what a good
opportunity looks like or how to run a startup

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watwut
> In addition, we found that students who had enrolled in BEPs sometimes had
> little interest in pursuing entrepreneurial ventures. For example, a
> doctoral student in a pharmacy BEP said that while she had initially been
> attracted to the entrepreneurial nature of the program, her final enrollment
> decision came down to more practical matters such as financial aid,
> proximity to home, and the program’s strong record of job placement.

A student attracted to entrepreneurship eventually made decision based on
practical rational consideration and that is somehow framed as bad?

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tonyedgecombe
>Entrepreneurs are known for their creativity and risk tolerance

I wonder about the idea that entrepreneurs are more risk tolerant. I've known
quite a few over the years and the all seem fairly conservative in their
decisions. Personally I'm not very risk tolerant at all.

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dctoedt
I wonder if I'm the only one irked by the arts crowd's efforts to skim off
STEM-education funding by claiming it should be STEAM.

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iovrthoughtthis
I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm starting a new one with my students.

~~~
sus_007
Mind sharing what's it about, at least ? :D

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rumcajz
Not sure this world needs any more risk taking.

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aj7
I can simplify things. Entrepreneurship is about MAKING MONEY. Pure and
simple. It’s not about ANYTHING else. It’s not about accuracy, elegance of
design, creativity, new science, perfecting things, or any other boring
nonsense. It’s about MAKING MONEY. As such, a certain innate greed enters the
picture. The entrepreneur wishes to be rich, not right. So entrepreneurship is
a personality, not a skill. Certainly you could teach useful things to budding
entrepreneurs, but not entrepreneurship.

~~~
neokantian
Entrepreneurship is always about achieving a non-financial goal. "The best
furniture in the world", "A PC on every desk", and so on.

Making money is just a speculative side effect of doing something right.

Worse, in that context, running after money pretty much is the best guarantee
not to make any.

Just think of it. A customer will not hand over his money to you, just because
you run so hard after it. He will give money because he also believes that
your furniture is the best in the world.

The situation is obviously different for an established corporation. They are
not about producing the best furniture in the world, but about maximally
milking their existing cash cow in the furniture industry. So, yes, for them
the bottom line is everything.

Still, corporations also die with their cash cow. Bottom-line milking only
works for a while. It will work, until it doesn't anymore.

~~~
mlboss
All businesses are about money. Everything else comes second. Making the best
furniture or PC does not make it a successful business. You have to do it with
within budget, you have to take care of sales/marketing, smooch the investors,
motivate employees, risk you health/relationships. No body takes so much pain
without a financial reward.

~~~
neokantian
> All businesses are about money. Everything else comes second.

That does not explain why Facebook did not make money for the first nine years
(2004-2012) of their existence. They were not worried about that. It also does
not explain why Amazon still does not seek to make one dollar in profits.
Amazon has not made profits for almost 20 years. Jef Bezos is simply not
interested in that.

Both examples still utterly destroyed their merely profit-seeking competitors.

Successful entrepreneurs (Such as e.g. Steve Jobs) are evangelical. They
staunchly believe in something. They also manage to convert staff and users to
their belief by successfully evangelizing their views.

A mere money grubber will never succeed in doing that.

What is the mere money grubber going to tell the world? That he wants money
and that the world should give him money? Seriously, what would be the message
of a money grubber? Why would anybody believe him? They obviously won't.

