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A Specialized MBA in Entrepreneurship: A Case Study
Entrepreneurship is one of the more divisive specializations at business school. After all, some famous entrepreneurs wouldn’t go within a country mile of an MBA degree. The debate as to whether such skills can be ‘taught’ rages on; however, it could be that detractors are missing the point. The top five business schools specializing in entrepreneurship (alphabetically: Babson, Harvard, IE Business School, Stanford and Wharton,) are not in the business of trying to sculpt something out of nothing. They insist they can help budding entrepreneurs along the way to business success, and at least provide skills that will help graduates in a corporate career. James Donald finds out how.
Entrepreneurship is now the second most popular MBA specialisation after international management. Students learn how to set up businesses from scratch and manage them through the first few make-or-break years. “Our entrepreneurship portfolio includes courses focussed on every element of the entrepreneurial life cycle,” says Professor John Mullins, Associate Professor at London Business School. “We cannot - nor would we want to - turn just anyone into an entrepreneur. What we can do is to provide networks, tools, frameworks, and mindsets to help our graduates succeed along the always challenging entrepreneurial path.”
“We teach our students the critical skills to run their own businesses and arm them with a knowledge base to help them. However, I am a firm believer that these are just strong business skills and will be just as valuable to large corporations,” says Emily Cieri, Director of the Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs (WEP) at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
MBA graduates will then be armed with the skills large corporations are on the look out for. Fred Wainwright, Executive Director of the Centre of Private Equity and Entrepreneurship at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, says: “Companies of all sizes are looking for ways to accomplish more with fewer resources. MBA graduates who think about strategic innovation and understand how to manage with constraints, how to leverage their teams’ efforts, and how to mitigate risks have a greater probability of receiving promotions to senior management.”
Olga Molina, part of the MBA recruitment team at British American Tobacco Russia, agrees: “In many cases, you need people who are ready to take bigger challenges and to work on start-up type of project, like opening new markets and exploring new product niches. I believe that having tasted the entrepreneurship spirit at the MBA course this opens wider opportunities for its students than it is traditionally thought.”
Students are obviously also encouraged to set up and run their own businesses. Wharton runs several competitions, including one for those students who don’t want to do a traditional internship over the summer break as it would not be relevant in developing their career, so they are given $10,000USD to start up and build a business. “This legitimises the work they are doing, and we give them as much support as possible, including access to mentors, but we don’t take any equity stake. Competition is very fierce,” says Cieri.
At IE they also help students set up their own business: “Each of the teams developing business plans in the Venture Lab compete through a number of rounds of internal competition for a slot at the Venture Day. The finalists are given the opportunity to pitch their plans to a panel of Venture capitalists and investors, with the winners receiving start up capital and investment,” says Michael Aldous, Associate Director of International Communications. “Alongside this there are other initiatives such as ICEVED, the International Centre for Entrepreneurship and Venture Development, a group of 25 top Business Schools that offers a global link to business schools, entrepreneurs, investors, and information.” IE have calculated that around 25 per cent of their graduates start their own business, or play some part within a start-up venture during their career.
Karl Purkarthofer, founder of BlynkOrganic, credits his MBA from IE in 2005 as invaluable: “The MBA certainly helped me to develop the ideas I was forming with regard to setting up my own business. People may think that it's not necessary for entrepreneurs, and to some extent there really is no better way than to learn by your own experience. However, the degree gave me a framework for thinking through the planning and development of the business plan. More important, I met my business partners and many other marvellous people.”
