Can Entrepreneurship be Taught in Class?
This article highlights teaching entrepreneurship skills in class to business students. Normally in science, scientists are taught how to operate equipment before they start making them. With this idea in mind, the writer says that also entrepreneurship skills should be taught to business students to equip them with skills of starting businesses and managing them.
Entrepreneurship is an important skill to every business person whether employed or self-employed. An entrepreneur is the person who can manage a business with respect to all risks involved and make it to grow. The manager is not restricted to managing only his business but also a business where he is employed.
Teaching entrepreneurship will make business managers to be well equipped with right skills required to manage businesses in a dynamic world (Hwang, 4). They will be able to grow business from small enterprises to large companies. They will also be able to make informed decisions about business operations that steer business growth.
An entrepreneur is required to be creative and innovative since the business world is not defined to one direction (Hwang, 4). With a great wealth of skills about business management, they will not be failing in business and restarting again, but they will be able to make positive decisions with respect to the current trends in business (Hwang, 5). Entrepreneurs are regarded as tomorrow’s chief executive officers of large enterprises.
The problem that may arise from teaching business skills to entrepreneurs is the dynamic situation of the business world. Some of the things may not be taught in class while some appear not to operate as they were expected from class theory. Therefore, entrepreneurs should be very dynamic in decision making.
Cultivating Arab Spring Entrepreneurs
The article talks about the evolution of entrepreneurship in Northern Africa. After the revolution of changes in leadership in various countries of Northern Africa, they moved to America, especially the US, to seek training of entrepreneurship by American entrepreneurs. This came after realizing that entrepreneurship can grow the economy of a country. The US entrepreneurs took the opportunity to train their colleagues from Northern Africa.
Entrepreneurship is a wide scope and is dynamic since it lacks a defined direction of doing things. The way one manager manages to overcome a particular risk may not work for another manager facing the same type of risk in the same business line. Therefore, it calls for sharing of information especially from those who are more experienced in entrepreneurship.
According to Fernandez (3), the sharing of knowledge on entrepreneurship skills between Americans with Arabic countries of Northern Africa will help steer the growth of businesses in Northern Africa. Americans have been in entrepreneurship business for a very long time and they have rich knowledge about success and failures resulting from entrepreneurship (Fernandez, 5).
These skills transferred to Arabs in Northern Africa will help them grow private businesses that offer employment opportunities thus reducing unemployment rate. It also gives the Americans an opportunity to participate in economic growth of the countries as they may also find potential investment opportunities.
Since they have already started organizing for various delegations across the northern countries, there is hope for success for a bright future to the people of Northern Africa (Fernandez, 6).
One failure resulting from the entrepreneurship trainings for Arabs is lack of capital to start up business. This is a challenge as most of the people targeted in these entrepreneurship campaigns are the unemployed who are expected to create employment opportunities by starting new businesses.
Fire up jobs factory with aid of startups
This article focuses on the need to finance or ease ways of obtaining credit for new entrepreneurs in the US. It criticizes the factory businesses that neither helps in creating substantial employment nor trains employees to be entrepreneurs. The writer supports the new law of Jobs Act which aims at reducing financial restrictions that hinder small entrepreneurships from acquiring credit.
Factories and other big companies in the US neither create new entrepreneurs nor employ a substantial number of people to help reduce unemployment rate (Glaeser, 9). According to the writer, the best way to ease unemployment and make the economy to grow well is through entrepreneurship. The US government has come in to help entrepreneurs by reducing the restrictions in credit acquisition through the Jobs Act (Glaeser, 2).
Although it is risky, it will make the entrepreneurs to startup businesses and grow them. The best way to create more employment opportunities is to train more entrepreneurs who will in turn start businesses that will employ more people. This will help the economy of the country to grow as more people will be employed and more capital will be generated.
For example, businesses created 2.33 million jobs while factories destroyed 7 million jobs (Glaeser, 12). Financing provide a platform for development of entrepreneurial skills as many people have been trained but lack sufficient capital to put the skills into practice.
Another step is easing ways of immigration of new entrepreneurs from foreign countries to come and also utilize the opportunity of entrepreneurship in the country (Glaeser, 13).
The shortcoming that may result from this act of the government is the high risk of repayment of credits since many businesses will now have an opportunity to obtain credit. Therefore, good measures should also be set to ensure that entrepreneurs are able to repay their credit.
Turning entrepreneurship into business
The article focuses on the way forward in transforming an entrepreneurship idea into a full business. It gives several examples of entrepreneurship ideas that have been set in the US and have either succeeded or failed in transforming into full businesses. He also gives some of the reasons for failures and success of the entrepreneurship ideas (Borelli, 1).
When a person comes up with a new business idea, he has to find a way of putting it into practice. According to Borelli (2), entrepreneurship skills are required in putting up the idea into practice as a business. Some of the ideas succeed but some fail along the way due to various reasons such as lack of entrepreneurial skills, wrong ideas that cannot transform into a business among others (Borelli, 4).
In this article, the entrepreneurship competition among students has helped the students to be creative and innovative in the business sector by coming up with new entrepreneurship ideas that can easily be transformed into businesses (Borelli, 6). This helped in starting of many companies in the US that now have substantial amounts of capital. This results from great ideas that came from the students.
Therefore, entrepreneurship competitions should be encouraged and empowered not only to the students but even to other members of the society. This will help in coming up with greater business ideas that can easily be transformed into full business. It will also help students to put into practice the skills learnt in class in creating employment opportunities.
One shortcoming from these ideas is lack of finance to transform the ideas generated by students or members of the society into full businesses. A plan needs to be made that will help in the financing of business ideas so that they are not lost as soon as they are discovered.
Works Cited
Borelli, Adam. “Turning Entrepreneurship into Businesses”. Wall Street Journal, 13 Feb. 2012. Web.
Glaeser, Edward. “Fire Up America’s Jobs Factory With Aid for Startups”. Wall Street Journal, 27 March. 2012. Web.
Fernandez, Jose. “Cultivating Arab Spring Entrepreneurs”. Wall Street Journal, 2 Feb. 2012. Web.
Hwang. Victor. “Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught”? Wall Street Journal, 20 March. 2012. Web.