Why Entrepreneurship Programs for Engineers Fail

Lost me in the first line:

1) The moment an engineer takes a risk and starts a company we stop calling them an engineer and start calling them an entrepreneur. If your job title is "engineer" then you by definition haven't taken that risk, but that doesn't mean that a lot of entrepreneurs don't come from an engineering background. (I believe the term hereabouts is 'technical co-founder'.)

2) Creativity is vital to engineering if you're building anything remotely new or different. Just because the product of that creativity is useful doesn't mean it isn't creative.

The research paper appears to have interviewed STEM entrepreneur programs asking about their expectation vs reality for students to participate or enter into entrepreneurial activities/careers.

After molding the programs to promote entrepreneurship heavily, the response from the students to be entrepreneurs are underwhelming. The article posits that the risk taking spirit of entrepreneurship is not easy to teach and suggests to screen for it when accepting students. It also suggests curriculum improvements - teach the logistics of how to start a company in one class, and identifying entrepreneurial opportunities in another. Finally, it suggests focusing on a few core classes rather than developing many broad classes.

The answer to the title is more on the lines of "because your program can be run better" than it is "because STEM majors are less risk averse than normal", as there's no solid evidence presented for the latter other than anecdotal observation.

You can make the counter-argument that the entire population is risk averse, not just STEM majors, and it's unknown whether or not STEM majors command a statistically significant difference when compared to the normal population.

The way to learn how to start a startup is by doing it. So the right way to teach "entrepreneurship," to the extent it can be taught, is something like Y Combinator, not a college class.

But after the crash the VC's figured out they got better results mentoring a founding engineer to become a CEO than going the MBA route. Now for some reason Harvard wants to reverse this trend? Doesn't make any sense at all to me.

It's really not at all clear that entrepreneurial value creation is anything other than finding ways to bilk people out of money while the sciences and technical arts have a long tradition of slow methodical work that leads to transformations in the underlying substrate of society.

Operationalizing these techniques is important, but let's say you trust in markets to take obvious opportunities and run with them. The entrepreneurs are essentially interchangeable parts, one of them will win. Much like how little we care about whether one news organization is an hour ahead of another, do we care that one company is slightly faster than another at cornering the market? Not really, except as sport.

The ones more likely to overcome this bias, are students who have a close relationship with an entrepreneurial parent or other role model. They may pick up the mentality of setting their own goals.

Furthermore, their peers may not be entrepreneurial either.

They also need to get used to the idea that there rarely definite yes/no answers to business questions. Real-life questions do not often come out of a book.

I believe you can't change that characteristic of people much. Rather than trying to teach people who aren't entrepreneurial to be entrepreneurial, it's probably better to teach tech skills to entrepreneurial people.

I realized as a developer Im virtually 100% certain of solving any technical problem. As a manager or an entrepreneur there are many problems, such as people problems or market problems, where you simply cant solve it. Often times you might have solved it but you cant be sure.

Also engineering has lots of fun purely intellectual logic and technical problems to solve. Building a business has lots of pure grind problems that dont take much intellectual horsepower but require lots of emotional fortitude and the ability to constantly switch from boring task to boring task, or to do the same boring task over and over.

Running payroll every two weeks, balancing books, opening mail, going to networking meetings, kissing up to people, training people, interviewing people, walking around and just talking to the team, talking to vendors, reviewing customer/vendor/employee contracts etc etc.

With regard to failures. Here are some of mine: having a star performer leave, laying people off during a recession at christmas, not being sure you can make payroll, losing a big client, having to fire a good friend.

That said, I had one lecturer who 'got it' and was the reason I studied communications as an undergraduate. I believe he wrote the second half of the course in the break between the semester halves (apparently lecturers are supposed to do that about 1 year in advance). I learnt more from him than almost every other business professor, mostly due to the fact he just didn't really care about the bureaucracy of the management school (I believe he had tenure). I asked him one day what he studied for his PhD and it turns out he studied 19th Century Scottish Poetry.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised. The guy was a total liability from every box you can check. But that's why he was good.

I was involved in some business education from the engineering department and it was pretty bad. Mostly academics talking about so and so's theory of the firm and no real business experience whatsoever.

It's no surprise that many engineers, often looking forward to a prosperous career, don't see a need to seek opportunities with relatively low chances for an upside. This can't be compared to the fact that an engineer designing a bridge has to be very careful.

Then I read the last line: "BEPs that successfully match students’ entrepreneurial attributes and development stand to help meet firms’ increasing demand for entrepreneurial graduates." And I'm no longer sure what they mean, do they see entrepreneurship as just another MBA, but for risk takers?

* Even if compensating for some factors can make this less, you are in general more likely to fail than succeed with starting a company.

However, at least in biotech a big reason for students disillusionment is that the programs aren't that great -- if the teachers don't have experience starting biotech companies, it's really hard to teach students what a good opportunity looks like or how to run a startup

A student attracted to entrepreneurship eventually made decision based on practical rational consideration and that is somehow framed as bad?

I wonder about the idea that entrepreneurs are more risk tolerant. I've known quite a few over the years and the all seem fairly conservative in their decisions. Personally I'm not very risk tolerant at all.

I'm starting a new one with my students.