When entrepreneurship students focus on creating value instead of just starting businesses, they gain skills they can use throughout their careers. Students who adopt a growth mindset toward entrepreneurship believe they can keep improving their entrepreneurial skills over time and use them to make a positive impact on society.
Few students have the ability or resources to start their own companies, so schools should not judge the success of entrepreneurial programs by the number of businesses students have launched. Instead, schools should focus on helping students identify opportunities for value creation and understand the purpose behind their entrepreneurial activities.
Business schools with entrepreneurship programs aim to ensure that students think entrepreneurially and seek to create value for society. One way schools can achieve this goal is by helping students develop growth mindsets toward entrepreneurship. Such mindsets encourage them to believe that, with time, effort, and the right strategies, they will be able to improve their entrepreneurial abilities and use them to create positive societal impact.
Understanding the importance of this belief requires an understanding of how mindsets work. According to American psychologist Carol Dweck, people form opinions about whether human abilities and characteristics can change. For example, someone might believe that intelligence levels cannot change, even with effort. This person has a fixed mindset about intelligence. On the other hand, someone who believes that intelligence can change has a growth mindset.
People can have different mindsets in various areas. For instance, someone might have a growth mindset about athletic ability but a fixed mindset about artistic ability. Another person might have a fixed mindset about computer science but a growth mindset about creativity.
The good news is that mindsets can be changed through short online experiments, practical exercises, and strategies that help people improve their entrepreneurial skills. Teachers can use additional findings and resources to develop mindset cultures in their classrooms, and these tools are both scalable and cost-effective.
Our focus is on how business schools can encourage students to adopt growth mindsets toward entrepreneurship. There is good evidence to suggest that developing such mindsets starts a chain of events that boosts students’ confidence in their entrepreneurial abilities. It also sparks their interest in pursuing entrepreneurial activities both academically and professionally throughout their lives.
A New Set of Metrics
Business school leaders often judge the success of their entrepreneurship programs by the number of students who make investor pitches, participate in business plan competitions, or launch new enterprises. However, few of these activities lead to viable startups.
The focus on launching businesses is often misplaced. While there are successful student startups from entrepreneurship programs, most students do not start businesses while in school or immediately after graduation. Of the startups that begin in these programs, only a few continue to progress after students leave campus.
This is partly because students interested in entrepreneurship often aren’t ready to start new businesses. The average age of a startup founder is between 30 and 40 years old, and most students are much younger. Additionally, students often lack resources and experience in industries, markets, and opportunities, making them ill-prepared to launch a firm.
For many schools aiming for sustainability goals, another measure of success is whether students create businesses with societal impact. But creating such impact usually requires large-scale efforts that aren’t possible within a single semester.
Given these realities, it is easy to see why business schools struggle to teach entrepreneurial thinking, make a positive societal impact, and meet their program goals.
A Focus on Growth
We believe that schools will be more successful if they take a different approach. Instead of focusing on “made-up” startups that disappear after graduation, schools could adopt a growth mindset toward entrepreneurship. They could teach students to see entrepreneurial action as a skill they can improve and use in different contexts, markets, and stages of their careers. Here are three suggestions for academic leaders:
1. Take a broader perspective. Make sure that both students and program administrators understand that entrepreneurship is not just about starting businesses. Stop pretending that metrics related to student-launched businesses are realistic. Instead, encourage students to articulate the purpose behind their entrepreneurial efforts. Share videos by popular authors like Simon Sinek and Guy Kawasaki, who advocate starting with a purpose and creating businesses with societal value.
When business schools take a broad approach to entrepreneurship content, both students and programs are more likely to achieve societal impact. They will focus on creating value, not just starting businesses.
2. Dig deeper. Encourage students to spend more effort identifying opportunities related to societal impact and sustainability. Show them that value creation goes beyond starting ventures.
For example, when asking students to brainstorm ideas, instructors should clarify that these ideas don’t have to be business startups. Instead, professors could ask students to come up with three ideas: one that fills a market gap, one that solves a personal problem, and one that identifies a needed innovation. These ideas could relate to current or future jobs.
When schools organize pitch competitions, they should also focus on value creation, not just venture creation. Schools could require all ideas to be tied to one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Many millennial and Generation Z students are already interested in SDG issues like eliminating poverty and addressing climate change. Once students identify opportunities to address these problems, they can organize their ideas and conduct market research to make their ideas a reality.
3. Encourage students to look beyond their careers. Career centers typically focus on helping students find internships and jobs, but work is only one part of life. What else will students spend time on after graduation? Volunteer opportunities? Service trips? Charitable engagements? Through these activities, students can make significant contributions to their communities and society.
A Shift in Education
As part of promoting a growth mindset, schools can assess students’ baseline attitudes at the start of any entrepreneurial program. After providing students with opportunities to engage with customers and explore new market ideas, teachers can ask students to reflect on what they’ve learned. Often, students will recognize that these activities have enabled them to grow in their entrepreneurial skills and abilities.
Over time, students with growth mindsets toward entrepreneurship will see beyond the educational content they learned in school. They will apply entrepreneurship principles in meaningful ways to everything they do, whether running small businesses, working in large corporations, or volunteering in their communities. Therefore, when schools focus on value creation in their entrepreneurship programs, they foster a growth mindset that graduates can use throughout their careers, leading them to create positive societal impact.
But for schools to focus on value creation, they need to make subtle changes in teaching methods. They need to apply a growth mindset to entrepreneurship education.
This means changing attitudes about what success and failure look like for their entrepreneurship programs. When they do this, they will stop viewing students as “products” and employers as “customers.” Instead, they will see students as “value creators.” As they make this shift, schools will take more holistic views of societal impact and how it can be created through entrepreneurial action.
When schools embrace this new way of thinking about value creation, they can develop metrics that are realistically achievable and more relevant to the larger world. Our hope is that more schools will make the effort to orient their mindsets, and their students’ mindsets, toward growth in the future.