by Sheridan Winn

There is not enough time in today’s fast-moving marketplace to learn by trial and error—and plenty of lessons about building new businesses can be taught in the classroom. To succeed as an innovator, you must also become an entrepreneur. The innovator conceives a new idea, but it is the entrepreneur who makes it a tangible success.

“We know that innovation and entrepreneurship can be taught,” says Kenneth P. Morse, leader of MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center. “Many students, upon entering our halls, have no intention of becoming entrepreneurs, but we know how to inject them with the entrepreneurial virus.”

Morse’s colleague, Ken Zolot, leader of the Innovations Teams Initiative at the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, agrees. “We don’t only study entrepreneurship at MIT—we also become entrepreneurs,” he says. “We see the Entrepreneurship and Deshpande centers as part of a vibrant ecosystem: Everything plugs in to our community. We make the right connections, then add the magic through social events. Successful people want to be in a place where things are happening.”

Morse believes innovation and entrepreneurship go hand in hand. “It is not enough to achieve a breakthrough in innovation if it languishes in an ivory tower,” he says. “The job is not done until the novel technology is reduced to practice, successfully promulgated in the cruel crucible of the marketplace and widely accepted as a global standard.”

MIT pioneered the teaching, research and practice of entrepreneurship in 1961, with 150 students in two courses. Today, its Entrepreneurship Center is one of the world’s best, with 1,500 students in 21 courses.
Morse and his team teach collaboration. Key to successful entrepreneurship, he believes, is respect for people from other disciplines and having in mind from the outset the needs of the customer. “Prima donnas and lone wolves build perpetually small companies,” says Morse.

Neal Thornberry, associate professor of management at Babson Executive Education, agrees: “A lone ranger is pretty alone—and usually dies on the plains.”

Business schools teach the tools of opportunity, focus, business planning and market research, but can they teach passion? Thornberry thinks not. “We light up students, but they have to have a love of what they are looking at to make it happen,” he says.
As well as igniting the spark to succeed, Thornberry says Babson focuses on the discipline of business. At the outset, he says, there are a lot of ideas and excited students. Then the hard work begins. “In my experience, only 15 percent of good ideas get through the entire opportunity process to completion,” says Thornberry. “Students have to get used to the door slamming in their faces. But, if in a class of 38 students we get three real ideas, one of which turns in to a $250,000 business, that’s good news.”
Entrepreneurship always involves innovation, but innovation does not always involve entrepreneurship, according to Thornberry. His research suggests that 80% of startup businesses fail because people with ideas lack the business skills needed to carry them through to commercialization. The bright side is that he thinks human beings are hardwired for innovation: “Imagine you are locked out of your house in the snow, in a bathrobe, at night—I can guarantee you will be innovative.”

Morse believes we need to practice innovation and entrepreneurship together because everything in life moves faster and faster. “Our society has learned to adapt to totally new technology,” he says. “It took over 80 years to promulgate the use of electricity, and yet the Internet, which is just another utility, has been globally embraced within a decade.”
College, says Thornberry, demystifies the concept that entrepreneurs are born, not made. The university setting harnesses potential, puts bright minds together, provides confidence, excitement and a large network of contacts—the starting tools for an innovative entrepreneur.
Sheridan Winn is a freelance business and lifestyle journalist based in the UK. Her insightful and entertaining features are published regularly in newspapers and journals on four continents.