When students of entrepreneurship focus on creating value rather than just building new businesses, they gain skills that they can use throughout their careers. Developing a growth mindset allows them to believe in their potential to keep growing as entrepreneurs and to make a positive impact on society.

Many students don’t have the means or readiness to start their own businesses, so schools shouldn’t measure the success of their entrepreneurship programs by how many businesses students have launched. Instead, schools should focus on helping students spot opportunities to create value and define the purpose behind their entrepreneurial work.

For business schools, encouraging students to think like entrepreneurs and aim to create societal value is a top priority. One way to achieve this goal is by fostering a growth mindset around entrepreneurship. Such a mindset enables students to believe that, with time, effort, and the right strategies, they can improve their entrepreneurial abilities and use them to make a positive societal impact.

To understand the importance of this belief, we need to look at how mindsets work. Psychologist Carol Dweck describes how everyone forms beliefs about abilities and characteristics and whether they can be changed. For example, a person with a fixed mindset about intelligence believes that it cannot be improved, no matter the effort. In contrast, someone with a growth mindset believes that intelligence can increase through effort.

People can have different mindsets across various areas. For instance, someone might have a growth mindset about athletic skills but a fixed mindset about artistic ability. Another person might feel that they can improve their creativity but not their computer skills.

The good news is that mindsets can be reshaped. Through online exercises, practical activities, and other strategies, people can improve their entrepreneurial abilities. Teachers can use scalable, cost-effective resources to foster growth-oriented mindsets in their classrooms.

In this article, we focus on how business schools can encourage students to adopt a growth mindset toward entrepreneurship. Research shows that having this mindset can boost students’ confidence in their abilities and motivate them to pursue entrepreneurship both academically and professionally throughout their lives.

A New Way to Measure Success

Often, business schools measure the success of their entrepreneurship programs by counting how many students pitch to investors, enter business competitions, or launch businesses. However, very few of these activities lead to sustainable startups.

The “launch” metric, in particular, can be misleading. While some successful student startups come from entrepreneurship programs, most students do not start businesses while in school or shortly after graduating. Of the startups that do begin in these programs, only a small number continue to develop after students leave school.

This is partly because most students aren’t ready to start businesses. The average age of a startup founder is between 30 and 40 years old, while most students are much younger. They often lack the resources, experience, and industry knowledge needed to launch a firm successfully.

For schools aiming for sustainability goals, another measure of success might be whether students create businesses with societal impact. However, making a meaningful societal impact usually requires a large-scale effort that can’t be achieved in a semester-long course.

Given these challenges, it’s understandable why business schools find it difficult to teach entrepreneurial thinking, make a societal impact, and meet program goals.

Focusing on Growth

We believe schools can achieve better outcomes by taking a different approach. Instead of focusing on student startups that may not continue after graduation, schools could adopt a growth mindset approach to entrepreneurship. This would mean teaching students to see entrepreneurship as a skill they can improve over time and apply in different contexts, industries, and stages of their careers. Here are three ways academic leaders can promote this shift:

1. Take a Broader Perspective: Schools should make it clear to both students and administrators that entrepreneurship isn’t only about starting businesses. It’s equally important to avoid relying on metrics tied to student-launched businesses. Instead, encourage students to reflect on the purpose behind their entrepreneurial projects. Schools could share videos from thought leaders like Simon Sinek and Guy Kawasaki, who advocate for creating meaningful, purpose-driven businesses.

    By broadening the focus of entrepreneurship education, schools can encourage students and programs to aim for societal impact by creating value, not just launching ventures.

2. Encourage Deeper Exploration: Students should spend more time identifying opportunities related to societal impact and sustainability, showing that value creation goes beyond business creation.

   For example, instructors could ask entrepreneurship students to brainstorm ideas that don’t necessarily involve starting a business. They could come up with ideas addressing marketplace gaps, solving problems they’ve encountered in their own lives, or introducing needed innovations in specific fields.

   Schools can also run pitch competitions that prioritize value creation over venture creation. For instance, all ideas could be required to align with one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Many students are already interested in SDG topics like poverty reduction and climate action, and pitch competitions centered on these goals would give them a chance to address these issues while building practical skills.

3. Promote Long-Term Impact: Schools should encourage students to think beyond their careers. While career centers usually focus on helping students find jobs or internships, students will also spend time on other activities after graduation, such as volunteering, service trips, or charitable projects. Through these activities, they can contribute to their communities and society.

Changing Education for Lasting Impact

To support a growth mindset, schools could assess students’ attitudes at the start of entrepreneurial programs. After giving them opportunities to engage with customers and explore new market ideas, instructors can ask students to reflect on what they’ve learned. Many students will find that these activities have strengthened their entrepreneurial skills and perspectives.

Over time, students who develop growth mindsets toward entrepreneurship will recognize that their education goes beyond school content. They will apply entrepreneurial principles in all areas of their lives, whether running small businesses, working for large companies, or volunteering in their communities. When schools focus on value creation in entrepreneurship programs, they help students build a growth mindset they can use throughout their careers, encouraging them to create positive societal impact at every turn.

To foster this shift, schools need to adjust their teaching methods. They’ll need to apply a growth mindset to how they teach entrepreneurship.

This will require changing how schools define success and failure for their entrepreneurship programs. Instead of seeing students as “products” and employers as “customers,” schools could see students as “value creators.” This shift would help schools take a more holistic view of societal impact and how it can be achieved through entrepreneurship.

By embracing this broader approach, schools can set realistic and relevant goals that apply to the larger world. Our hope is that more schools will work to align their goals, and those of their students, with a growth mindset for the future.