The businesses of today are facing a lot of limitations and challenges that lead them to drastically modify their strategies and recruit employees differently: they need them to think entrepreneurially, but from where to begin?
Entrepreneurial thinking starts with business schools. Yes, even if it’s innate to some, for others it can be taught, and business schools took it upon themselves to incorporate entrepreneurship courses and programs as a core part of their curriculum.
Entrepreneurial Thinking
Entrepreneurial skills can be developed early on in courses and projects that allow students to work with various people of different personalities on challenging cases studies and a number of different ideas to help develop their business journey and strategies. Students will be motivated in their ways of thinking and learn the different approaches they have to use in a real-life setting that will twist their conventional thinking methods and teamwork interactions as well as decision-making. Exploring a diversity of students backgrounds shows how an entrepreneurial mindset can be transferred from one person to another regardless of their professional experience or managerial position.
Some Numbers
- According to entrepreneur.com, despite fewer businesses launching every year, business failure rates are on a long-term decline which has been encouraging a lot of the youth to invest in their ideas. In fact, The Small Business Administration (SBA) states that nearly 80% of small businesses survive their first year.
- Based on the National Association of Small Businesses report, young entrepreneurs need to consider three main challenges they will be facing early-on and throughout their career: economic uncertainty, fluctuation in customer spending, and replicated business models.
These challenges can be only faced with a strong head, stamina, and the right kind of preparation for the entrepreneurial world.
Entrepreneurial Learning
Entrepreneurial programs have a very rich module that allows students, who can be working professionals too, to discover or enhance their entrepreneurship skills by diving into the world early on before kick starting their startup or grow their business idea. During these courses, students get the chance to share ideas, working individually and in teams, and build business plans. They’ll realize soon enough that their courses focus a lot on balancing research-led teaching with experiential learning.
A perfect example for the latter would be consultancy projects where students consult for small-business owners, startups, or even organizations, and even for some of them it is the case of starting their very own venture. This will incentivize them even further to be responsible leaders and entrepreneurs at a very early stage of their study. Entrepreneurial thinking is no longer restricted to startups and the business world, since the semi-professional work experience the students will have in these types of projects will let them face real life business problems and constraints.
Starting one’s own business and having one unique idea is rare and requires big steps that will make an even bigger impact across many industries. As business school started to offer more entrepreneurship courses and programs, the entrepreneurial spirit is being awakened inside students as they figure out along the way that it’s a way of is thinking and living. Luckily for them, universities are paving them the way to explore and grow.
Discover the entrepreneurship and innovation programme open to all fifth-year Master’s programme students.
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