AGSM Creates Sydney Startups Challenge for its MBAs: MBA News

By QS Contributor Updated Jun 15, 2014

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Introduction
New scheme considered ‘win-win’ for Sydney startups and aspiring MBA entrepreneurs

AGSM Creates Sydney Startups Challenge for its MBAs: MBA News main image

The Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) has launched a new initiative with Sydney startups, aimed at providing its students with hands-on entrepreneurial experience.

The idea is for Sydney startups in need of strategic expertise on a particular project to be assigned an AGSM MBA entrepreneur over a period of 12 weeks.

The students, who are to be amongst those opting for AGSM’s entrepreneurship and strategy elective, will then have to present their work before a panel of judges which will include the founders of the chosen startups.

It is hoped that the scheme will greatly benefit both the startups and the MBA entrepreneurs involved. “Immersing people in real life environments with real life problems was the best way to get them involved in entrepreneurship”, said Jeffrey Tobias, Program Director at AGSM in an interview for Australian site, StartupSmart.

New scheme considered ‘win-win’ for Sydney startups and aspiring MBA entrepreneurs

“The thing a lot of startups lack is that they’re good at the innovation but not so much at the basic business skills such as profit and loss sheets, budgets and balance sheets. MBA students are good at that, but they lack the innovation and entrepreneurship. So if we put them together, it’s a win-win”, Tobias added.

AGSM, the postgraduate section of the Australian School of Business at the University of NSW, is seeking 20 startups in total and have already received 10 applications since announcing the initiative last week.

It is undoubtedly entrepreneur-minded initiatives such as these that recently saw the University of NSW (UNSW) named the leading Australian school at which to launch a career as an entrepreneur. Using data from CrunchBase, it was found that UNSW had created twice as many entrepreneurs in the last 15 years as its closest rival, the University of Technology Sydney.

Even after taking into the account the difficulty in assessing numbers of entrepreneurs, UNSW and AGSM must be doing a lot of things right when it comes to tackling entrepreneurship. The case above is a perfect example of how more MBA programs are reacting to a growing interest in becoming an entrepreneur by experimenting with a wide variety of teaching approaches.

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