Academic entrepreneurship

2 of my 4 courses this first half of the semester are based on entrepreneurship. The hands-on approach, the obvious and direct link to the real world, and the positive reputation of the teachers made me really interested, but there were some things they forget to mention.

The two courses have very different foci: The challenging GLOBE class, Global Venturing, essentially wants us to build a business model from the ground up. The other, Entrepreneurial Consulting, pairs teams of students with an existing company, who use many of their tools, research, and time, to help the company out. On paper, this looks like a great opportunity to develop skills in an area which often flies under the radar in business schools more focussed on corporatism. There is a reason why that happens though:

Two main points stand out. First, there is a severe conflict of interest between working for a real-life client, but being graded by a professor (entrepreneurial consulting). Of course the professor is involved throughout the course, but while we are trying to discover some issues for our client, if our professor thinks those ideas are bad, we are most likely going to discard them. Conversely, if he likes something which we feel is odd or not really optimal, we'll include anyway. This conflict has been apparent since day 1. We were supposed to interview 1 person about our product to provide some data for class. Our group quickly figured that the response of 1 person would tell us exactly nothing about the market of our product, so we did some market research online instead, and started drawing up some exploratory questionnaires. When we got to class, we sat for 75 minutes and listened to a class of 30 people all described their single interview. A company whose product cleaned industrial pipes got great ratings and a solid forecast from the interviewers 19 year old room mate (who had no clue what was going on). That was great work -  we had communication issues, since we hadn't done the research we were told to do. Because our professor has a structured framework for our course, we were a liability to his grading system, even though our client would benefit more from our work. Last week we had the first of 3 deliverables, and with hard work and some appeasement, we come out with good reviews.

Second, global venturing (the other course) shows the issue of "creating an idea". We have had several discussions on what "entrepreneurship" means, and it can encompass several stages of a start-up. Few people in our class were idea-generators, where a lot of people were idea-executors. Both are needed in a start-up. Unfortunately, my group failed to produce a great idea (let alone one that might actually be a marketable product) in the few days we had for that assignment. Therefore we got stuck with a lousy idea, but have to develop a whole business model around it. Thus our team (including myself) struggle to find motivation and dedication to a school project, rather than a potential venture. It seems to me that while your can teach modelling and structure in a classroom, idea generation tends to come from outside the business school.

The next 9 days are going to have exactly 0% blogging - two exams + a group paper of 30 pages needs to be written. Furthermore I am heading to Wharton on Friday with 4 other UNC students to represent the school in a case competition. Too much? Perhaps. A memorable experience? Definitely!