What educational institutions need to do to kindle that creative spark in students.
The interesting thing about entrepreneurship is that successful entrepreneurs tend to be famous and well-known but how they became successful is often shrouded in mystery and myth. “How can I become an entrepreneur?” cannot be answered without busting a few of these myths.
Myth no. 1: “Some people are born entrepreneurs, risk-takers, with a bold, extroverted personality.”
But systematic research finds little support for this idea. The key point is that anyone who is interested can be an entrepreneur; there is no genetic prerequisite.
Myth no. 2: “Some people are brilliant and naturally come up with brilliant ideas.”
Again, research suggests the opposite. Test this yourself: spend 10 minutes to brainstorm and create as many ideas as you can. Then spend another 10 minutes on some Internet searches. Most likely, you will find that that at least a few of your ideas are being successfully implemented by someone somewhere. The point is that all of us have many ideas and, if we put our work and initiative into some, a few will turn out to be brilliant.
Myth No. 3: “I don’t have all the resources, skills, contacts yet to make my brilliant idea a reality, so I cannot start.”
The reality is that the stars will never perfectly align. The key to entrepreneurship is not to wait until you find all the skills and resources you need. Start with whatever you have. You experiment, change course and, often to your own surprise, will end up with something more novel and interesting than your original idea. So, the right image is not of a person climbing a ladder to reach the goal. The right analogy is of a cook using whatever is available to cook. This brings us to the final key element of an entrepreneurial mindset — don’t take failure too seriously.
In the classroom
While the above are specific strategies and mindsets that individuals can adopt to be more entrepreneurial, what about education and institutions?“Can entrepreneurship be taught? The technical know-how needed to build and sustain a business is taught in a classroom. In addition, the above myths can be quite pernicious, and the classroom is a good place to bust them. Finally, entrepreneurship is often a lonely journey, and educational institutions can be great places to find a community of mentors and fellow-entrepreneurs.
I have left the most vexing question for the last: the suspicion that our current educational institutions kill entrepreneurship and innovation. There is some truth to this belief. To ensure that students will not go astray or slack off, many educational institutions are highly monitored systems, narrowly focused on reproducing content, where students are offered little trust or autonomy. For instance, a complex system of rules and sub-rules and pop-quizzes and random checks is implemented to ensure that no one is slacking off. Such environments might make parents, teachers and administrators feel safe but they are often counter-productive, killing interest and initiative, and redirecting students’ significant brain power into figuring out more innovative ways to get around tests and rules. Even more worrying, students lose interest in learning or creating or problem-solving.
Institutions must take a more balanced approach where exams systematically test for core concepts; but beyond these, the teachers’ focus should not be on exams or monitoring, but on supporting students and helping them build and create what they want. As teachers, we must make this shift back to the basic foundations of our profession — teaching content can be done easily by a bot or a video, but helping a student to discover his/her true passion and develop the skills and confidence to translate his/her ideas into real ventures is a much more sophisticated and exciting task.