> 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.
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.
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.
The researchers surveyed current students and recent (one year) graduates of a pharmacy program. [0] They were not surveying job titles (like “technical co-founder” or “pharmacist”) but rather looking at what they call entrepreneural awareness, i.e. had the students “blended” business and technical education actually given them an ability to see business opportunities.
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.
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.
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.
I tend to agree. I think anyone who enrolls for a class in entrepreneurship has pretty much demonstrated that they don't have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Not that they're not capable or qualified. And indeed, they might be more capable and more qualified after taking the class. But entrepreneurs are the ones who just go out and do it, learn from experience. People who expect to learn from a class are kinda the opposite of that (and I say this as someone who took an entrepreneurship class as part of my MBA). Over-broad generalization, to be sure, but I think there's truth to it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
> 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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I don't know if I agree with that last statement. Explain the behavior of war zone journalists or executives in humanitarian organizations. Yes, you need to be sure your needs are taken care of (money wise), but once you have that, there's a universe of possible non-monetary motivations that include stupendous amounts of pain (and many that don't that are just as worthwhile).
I don't believe this. It just depends on the motivation of the entrepreneur. I know entrepreneurs who created non-profit startups and work to improve public services, what do you say about this?
If your motivation is only money, I'm not sure you can go as far as when you have a true goal. Look at Elon musk, I'm sure he could have made money much more easily if he would have continued into banking services like PayPal.
I’m not so sure that something like entrepreneurship is pure and simple. There’s more to entrepreneurship than making money. It requires a balanced set of things, as does being an engineer or an artist.
But if you’re selling something, at least you’re creating something that’s (possibly) valuable such that people are willing to pay for.
In the end, you’re creating something. Whether it’s good or bad is generally subjective. But hopefully it’s worth it.
Saying "Entrepreneurship is only about MAKING MONEY" is like saying "Life is only about OXYGEN". While we certainly need oxygen in order to live, it is not the very point of our lives.
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.