An Educational Start-Up
Last week I made the trek to campus to sit in on a case discussion. Sure it’s summer, but the crews who clean blackboards in Aldrich and Hawes are still pretty busy. In fact, we’re all busy, thank you very much. How else would you get your nice, shiny copy of the Bulletin in early September? In any case, this particular class was being led by HBS professor Bill Sahlman, and the students were in fact professors, representing a Rand McNally of institutions: St. Petersburg State University, the University of Malta, the University of Zagreb, the Warsaw School of Economics, Delft University of Technoloy, Maastricht University…it was a bit like sitting in on a session of the United Nations, although the participants were primarily from Europe. This was, after all the (deep breath) European Entrepreneurship Colloquium on Participant-Centered Learning (EECPCL), an intensive eight-day program that focuses on curriculum development and on the case method as a means of teaching students about entrepreneurship. Now in its fourth year, the EECPCL is sponsored in part by Bert Twaalfhoven (MBA ’54), president and founder of the European Foundation for Entrepreneurship Research and a lifelong entrepreneur in his own right. The program has some 250 alumni from 128 institutions and more than 40 countries.
Program classes included “Transforming an Educational Institution—Getting Participant-Centered Learning to Work” (with Professor Paul Marshall), “Learning and Developing as Leaders and Teachers” (with Professor Tom DeLong, and the session that I sat in on, “Finding Great Cases.” The case in question was Sahlman’s “Dr. John’s Products, Ltd.”, the story of serial entrepreneur John Osher and his quest to invent, manufacture, and distribute an inexpensive electric toothbrush. Along the way, of course, he encounters all sorts of interesting dilemmas relating to capital, distribution, branding, and partnering.
After a gentle nudge on Sahlman’s part (“This would be the audience participation part of the class”), the professor-students were off and running, learning about the case method by experiencing it firsthand. Along the way, Sahlman highlighted some of the qualities that make Dr. John’s what he modestly termed “a reasonable case,” noting that it’s fairly straightforward while including the classic framework of people, opportunity, context, and deal. Osher, he adds, isn’t taking any undue risks—he’s simply staging a series of sensible experiments (primarily with other people’s money) in order to gain the information needed to make further decisions.
After class, I chatted with Natalya Loce from the faculty of Riga Technical University, which has seen a surge in older students seeking to update their business skills and knowledge in the (relatively) new reality of post-Soviet Latvia. “I like this practice-based method,” she said. “These different approaches to teaching, some are not so familiar to me. I am fully impressed.”
Despite Natalya’s endorsement, I wondered if she, and the other professors, would have a tough row to hoe when they returned to their respective institutions. Would they face skeptical administrators and/or students who view entrepreneurship as something that you learn by doing, rather than reading about and discussing the experiences of others? Are there any entrepreneurs (or would-be entrepreneurs) who’d care to weigh in on this matter? Do some aspects of running a business defy a classroom education, even if the school in question is HBS?
Your Comments
Great post. There is no doubt that education and actual experience complement each other very well and educational approach to entrepreneurship is always enhanced by experience and vice versa.
I stumbled upon this article while searching for start up information. Being an an entrepreneur my experience is that that you cannot coach someone to become Osher, but can certainly motivate. I learnt a lot from Unemployment venture than from my MBA, which gave me the confidence to do this in the first place.