What are universities in Europe doing to teach entrepreneurship?

Any entrepreneur will tell you: a fair pinch of pluck and grit are vital to success.

But so too is the right amount of nurturing. While it is not every university that can spit out the next Branson or Gates, their role in imparting life and business skills is well established.

But what is the best way to pass on entrepreneurial skills to students? A frank answer might be that some universities either do not know or do not feel it is one of their duties.

“One of the shortcomings of universities [in Europe is that] – they’re creating academics,” said Tuula Teeri, President of Finland’s Aalto University. “This is important but we have to know that we can’t employ all these students we educate,” she said.

Or perhaps it is just too hard. “It’s like artistic talent: you can’t tell someone how to be a Picasso,” added Teeri.

Experimenting in the classroom

Not that this sentiment is likely to discourage educators from trying. Picasso did not just pick up a paintbrush and produce perfection: he had formal training.

Methods used in universities to teach entrepreneurship today have evolved and continue to do so. The old ways of teaching entrepreneurship, with war stories of successful entrepreneurs and theories taught in a straight line, is dying – if not dead everywhere already.

Students still learn to write business plans and the basics of marketing and finance: fundamental skills and processes that are not singular to entrepreneurship. But to many universities, students spending hours with their heads buried in spreadsheets is of decreasing importance.

The fundamentals are easy, said Giovanni Azzone, Rector of Polytechnic University of Milan. “We can teach people how to do a market analysis or make a business plan. Not a problem in my opinion,” he said. Going the extra mile is where it gets interesting, he explained.

Then comes what Teeri refers to as the “entrepreneurial shower” – where students are let loose to solve problems, share knowledge, or turn ideas into successful products.

One surprising exercise Azzone does with his students is playing games of bridge. “People say to me, ‘you’re teaching cards?’ But it involves critical skills. Students learn about the best decision, strategy, instinct and [feinting],” he said.

Many think that starting and running a business requires skills that only develop in the real world, not in a classroom setting. Educators must find ways to bridge the two.

In the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), a module on teamwork is mandatory for all students, John Einar Hustad, Pro-rector for Innovation, said. Interdisciplinary teams, or “villages” in Hustad’s terminology, are given real-life problems faced by different industry sectors.

Students are actually given the chance to work with industry executives to solve problems. “The project can fail but the student can have a success,” said Hustad.

Finding part-time professors from industry to teach some classes is a great idea too, said Hustad. NTNU employs around 200 adjunct professors from industry to lecture in the university’s 30 courses that touch on entrepreneurship. “They bring a practical sense,” Hustad said.

The result is that, “Typically eight new companies are launched every year [by] students who went to our entrepreneurship school,” Hustad noted.  

Aalto, is also heavily involved in entrepreneurship training and has invited Silicon Valley icons over to meet students. Matchmaking students with summer jobs in industry is important; in some cases, students earn extra credits this way, Teeri said.

Simon Hepworth, Director of Enterprise at Imperial College London, fully endorses the idea of bringing in guest speakers. “Seeing those around you, innovating, is a source of inspiration for students,” he said.

His area of work in university-industry partnerships is “not an area that’s well understood.” Hepworth said. “It has very few models; it’s an emerging theory, basically.” But universities are clearly adopting it.

Hepworth, who has 14 years’ experience in the automotive sector, where he held positions in Ford and Visteon, likes to do foresight exercises, where students imagine what the world looks like in 20 years’ time. “Genomic dating consultants and pet geneticists were two ideas for the future students came up with,” he said.

The four educators were speaking in a panel discussion on “Teaching Innovation: A masterclass” at the Science|Business Academic Enterprise Awards, held at TU Berlin earlier this month.

What’s stopping further initiatives?

Introducing new elements like these into the classroom is a good start but it can be daunting for teachers. “The bottleneck is the faculty, not the students, who can’t learn it quickly enough,” said Teeri. “Has there ever been an era where students had tech in their hand that they know better than the faculty members?”

It is not always clear what the outside world needs from today’s students. If you get around a table with human resources on one side and technology executives on the other, you’ll get conflicting requests, said Hepworth. “The tech experts will say, we would like you to teach students top technical skills; we don’t care about soft skills. HR executives, on the other hand, will say ‘No, no, no – we want broad-minded people to work with us’,” he said.  

Whatever method universities end up settling on, it should be enjoyable for students. Hustad says, quoting university’s mantra: “No failure, no risk. No risk, no fun. No fun, no learning.”