Successfully Teaching Entrepreneurship
by Bill Aulet
One of the great challenges for me as an entrepreneurship educator is knowing whether the material I am teaching works — that my students get value out of the curriculum and that they are more successful entrepreneurs as a result. I know that the methods I teach helped me go from losing money in my first venture to exiting my third venture after it had increased in value by a half a billion dollars, but that is just one data point. I believe in what I teach, but how do I know it works for others? How do I answer the logical and appropriate challenge of “prove it?”
This question has been in the back of my mind since I started teaching over ten years ago. In that time, several systematic analyses of the programs we’ve run have given me the confidence to say “I know it works.” It will be impossible to unequivocally prove scientifically that they work because we will never have a perfect control set to measure against — it would be unethical to deprive a random subset of students of entrepreneurship educational opportunities — but the three data points I present here do as good a job as possible at evaluating the programs’ impact. I should also say that as an educator, I deeply believe that the measurement of our success should be more than economic impact from new companies because I believe that entrepreneurship is about more than startups. All of this considered, while incomplete, the success of new companies is the metric most often used in these analyses. New company formation is the one clear metric that seems to validate these programs in the eyes of the public. It is also the one we can currently best quantify.
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Originally published at https://www.d-eship.com on December 29, 2019.
