Last week I mentioned that I was going to write a post about the lean start-up approach to creating an entrepreneurial venture using Crazy Spuds, a snack food venture as a case study.  But as often happens in life something intervenes to disrupt even the best laid plans.  During the course of preparing that post, I had a conversation with a prominent Harvard Business School (“HBS”) professor.  One of the most interesting things he said was that HBS graduates typically do not create start-ups until 5-7 years after graduation.  He went on to recommend a recently published study on entrepreneurship education by the Kauffman Foundation: “Entrepreneurship Education Comes of Age on Campus: The Challenges and Rewards of Bringing Entrepreneurship to Higher Education.”  One of the study’s conclusions is that entrepreneurship education “has the potential to reshape students …, offering them the tools and mindset they need to approach their careers – in whatever field they chose – from a more entrepreneurial and innovative perspective.”  This point made me think that entrepreneurship on campus can be about more than just helping students and faculty create start-ups: an understanding of the principles of entrepreneurship could stimulate student ingenuity and innovativeness, teach independence, encourage real world problem solving and facilitate individual social empowerment.

The HBS professor’s comment coupled with the Kauffman Foundation study prompted me to think about my approach to examining entrepreneurship at Yale at the individual level, by focusing on how elites view and use entrepreneurship as a strategic option to negotiate the evolving meaning of work and what it means to have a job in the 21^st century.  I began to recognize a pattern at Yale: many students who are engaged in entrepreneurship activities (clubs or working on a specific idea or venture) pursue their entrepreneurial interests to a point, then abandon them to rejoin their classmates on the traditional route for jobs and careers of educational elites.  In my research notes there are numerous examples of this tendency, which has led me to conclude that perhaps I and others are labeling these students as entrepreneurs when in fact they are merely exploring the entrepreneurship realm out of curiosity, and a sense that entrepreneurs are cool in today’s society.  Based on their apparent activities, I might be ascribing a preconceived set of motives to them that are incorrect.

Further evidence of this finding was provided on Friday.  I was in a discussion with three budding entrepreneurs about whether they will continue their venture beyond the summer.  One of the discussants said that he was unsure whether he would continue with the venture beyond graduation.  His teammates echoed his viewpoint.  The word unsure rang out to me: this word seemed to be the thread through the pattern that I had uncovered of abandoned entrepreneurial aspirations and ventures.  Afterwards I had a conversation with another Summer Fellow whom I asked whether he would pursue his venture after graduation and he was unsure also.  (The ventures he is interested in would require millions of dollars to develop.)  He intends to interview for a job in the aerospace field.

My research indicates that just because someone seeks advice or even starts a venture does not mean he wants to be an entrepreneur at this point in his life.  There is a fallacy that what is needed is a better understanding of the process of creating a start-up: quick lessons in how to understand markets, customers, capital raising etc.  My research is telling me that much more is needed.  For faculty entrepreneurship is viewed as a distraction from research and even perhaps harmful to being considered for tenure; for students it distracts from preparing for the traditional job market and is perceived as being “risky.”

At Yale, and probably on many college campuses, administrators and others are focusing on harvesting start-ups without adequately planting seeds and tilling the soil.  Many entrepreneurship initiatives focus on how to assist students and faculty to bring their nascent ideas to an execution phase.  But what is not being considered is the individual’s motivation for working on an entrepreneurial venture.  Perhaps more thought should be put into designing curricula or other teaching devices that empower students and faculty to understand what the foundational elements of entrepreneurship are beyond creating a start-up.  New metrics, beyond counting the number of ventures started and the amount of capital raised, will need to be developed in order to capture how Yale’s initiatives planted the seeds for future entrepreneurial activities among its students and faculty. Two questions that might be transformative for Yale are: How can entrepreneurship initiatives teach interested students and faculty how to think about innovation and invention?  And then, can these initiatives teach them what to think about, and how to turn thinking into direct and immediate action?