At the dynamic heart of successful modern economies are entrepreneurial cultures that make a vast difference to people’s lives and the liveliness of their countries’ economies. These cultures allow people with the necessary skills and determination to create great wealth for themselves and their communities.
Over the past decade their enterprises, mostly small- and medium-sized, have generated most of the new jobs created in the advanced economies. They regularly innovate and form new enterprises, often breathing new life into businesses where the previous owners had given up.
Contrast this with the huge job losses from the very large enterprises that constantly strive to increase efficiency. Quite rightly, governments and individuals are demanding business education that produces more creators of entrepreneurial organisations — entrepreneurs. Are they succeeding?
Entrepreneurs are people who show initiative and take calculated risks to make profits. Changes to the structure of Western economies led to a vast increase in researching and teaching entrepreneurship over the past 20 years. Is this research driving the trend towards entrepreneurially driven studies at business schools and universities? And what impact is it having on the delivery and structure of conventional MBAs?
Some providers simply added the label ‘entrepreneurial” to a range of existing courses, the conventional content and delivery being unchanged. This is not all bad. Much of the traditional content could help aspiring entrepreneurs. However, a change in the balance from theory towards practice was required.
Other providers changed the balance and reinforced this by bringing practising managers and financiers into the classroom. They added practical projects such as developing detailed business plans. But, for too many business schools, the emphasis on theory remains unchanged.
In practice, aspiring entrepreneurs need more. They will need to lead and integrate the various functions of their enterprises, to focus these on achieving their strategies. Programmes that assist in this help entrepreneurs to figure out the real strategic options and choose one they can implement; figure out the critical activities that will make their strategies work; and make sure the necessary activities and changes take place; and evaluate and manage the risks related to their business.
Debra Bouwer from KwaZulu-Natal, an Edinburgh Business School (EBS) MBA graduate, started her studies with the goal of fulfilling an ambition to obtain her MBA and equip herself with essential business skills. One of the reasons that she selected EBS was because it worked on the basis of international business practices.
Bouwer believes that taking a dream and turning it into a profitable venture requires a leap of faith and a belief that the future potential far outweighs the inherent risks. If this is the case, then reducing the risks associated through careful and forward planning is essential in the start-up of any new business. She emphasises that the EBS MBA equipped her with the skills to determine where the potential risks lay and how best to avoid them.
She completed the MBA in two-and-a-half years and, in that time, gained the confidence and expertise to move forward in her career to the point that she opened an adventure tour company. According to Bouwer, the business acumen gained has proven beneficial time and time again, particularly in the fields of finance and marketing.
Bouwer says that being a sociologist by profession meant she had no training in financial management and had always had an inherent fear of anything to do with finance and accounting. However, through step-by-step progression of the finance module Bouwer came to understand the very real and logical basis of financial and management accounts and, at the end of the day, found financial accounting to be one of her favourite subjects.
Given that 80% of our business is drawn from the international market, students on the programme deal extensively in foreign currencies. The marketing module, coupled with that of strategic planning, highlights the dynamic nature of the market and the need to ensure that the objectives of the business are clearly defined, implemented through planning and constantly evaluated, thereby avoiding the potential for risk.
So, it is important to recognise that an investment of time and money in an MBA programme should give more than the generic set of tools and techniques to understand business and management. You should look for an MBA that enables you to make a real impact and convert the entrepreneurial opportunities available to your organisation, by making sure you can recognise and capitalise on strategic choices.
Alex Roberts is a professorial fellow at the Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University, Scotland. The MBA programme at the school is distributed by eDegree in sub-Saharan Africa