Studen Entrepreneurs
Read stories of people who had a taste of entrepreneurship when they were still students under me. Business startups from class are the most enjoyable to watch because you see, firsthand, how young entrepreneurs behave.
Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?
People ask me all the time if entrepreneurship can be taught.
Entrepreneurship can be taught. Entrepreneurship, also, cannot be taught. I am paid to teach entrepreneurship so the politically right answer is the former. Yet, no one has ever taught me how to do business, and I pretty much learnt everything I know through research, asking questions and making mistakes.
So, while I believe people learn best by practicing and making mistakes, I also believe I would have made less mistakes if someone was there to guide me. Therefore in my classrooms, I strive to create an environment where it is really alright to make stupid decisions and mistakes and then learn from them. After all, it is much less costly to make mistakes in the classroom than in the real world. In every of my entrepreneur classes, I give every student an opportunity to start a business, regardless of what they want to be when they graduate. The reason is simple: there are just so many lessons you can learn from doing that, and merely lecturing is just not enough to bring those lessons taught come to live. I want students to test out the entrepreneurial theories I put forth to them.
Student-preneurs
Most of my students end up in corporations and become employees. Many of these students have come back and share how having a chance to run a business even for a short period of time in class changed their perspectives of things forever. Some of my students become entrepreneurs. Some, but a surprising large number. After tasting blood as entrepreneurs, many can no longer be satisfied as salaried workers.
Not all the businesses started in my classes go on and become great enterprises. That’s not my objective, anyway. My aim is to provide a learning environment through useful tools. Those teaching tools include the businesses the students chose to start. To the students’ credits, some of these businesses did become viable businesses.
The videos and articles below, “tagged business startups from class,” will give you insight into how young entrepreneurs who have passed through me felt when they first started as students. Here, you can read about how students make their own teaching tools and learn much from them. Have fun reading and watching the fun they had, and the lessons they’ve learnt. Enjoy!
You can view some of the videos here.
You can contribute your stories here.
