Eating Soup with a Fork: Teaching Entrepreneurship to Business Students

More and more people are getting aware of the benefits of “inventing a job rather than finding a job”. Across the world, universities and colleges are rushing to introduce entrepreneurship classes. This phenomenon has rekindled the age-old debate, whether entrepreneurship can be taught in business schools or one is better off learning it ‘by doing’?


A number of academics, researchers, entrepreneurs and business people have participated in the debate and raised their voices. I share the view of professor at Harvard Business School - Howard Stevenson, who thinks that teachers have the ability to show students what mistakes to avoid, save them from getting caught up in the “paralysis of analysis” and help them acquire the knowledge they need to move forward and adjust (Can Entreneurship Be Taught?). I am also one of the proponents of the idea that entrepreneurship education prepares potential and existing entrepreneurs to take decision “beyond gut feeling”, equips them with skills and characteristics to avoid common mistakes and to helps them to learn about the pitfalls.

Teaching entrepreneurship in an enterprising manner in the business schools can only be achieved by making to shift the ‘focus’ of learning from knowledge to insight, from critical analysis to creativity, from concept / theory to conceptualising a problem or opportunity, from passive understanding to active understanding, and from absolute detachment to emotional involvement. The teachers have to make sure that they achieve this shift in the ‘focus’ of learning by arousing every student’s curiosity for inspiration and stimulation during the ‘process’ of learning.

Entrepreneurs need to be able to act out different roles in different situations. In building relationships with different stakeholders – with a banker, venture capitalist, government official, employee, regulator, customers and so on. They should be able to think and speak on their feet and more importantly, they should have an ability to have empathy with an alternative point of view. The teachers in the business schools should polish their students’ capacity to argue and present a case in a flexible, harmonious, and innovative manner.

To achieve this goal at the University of Bedfordshire, we design our entrepreneurship modules to maximise our students’ potential for stimulating entrepreneurial attributes and insights and equip them with skills for action. We use enterprising modes of learning focused upon practicing behaviours, developing skills and reinforcing attributes associated with being an enterprising person by using case studies, role plays, and critical incidents in the classroom. Enterprising modes of learning are based upon the assumption that all people have some capacity for behaving entrepreneurially and a teacher’s job is to enhance that capacity. But some students are naturally more enterprising than others and every person demonstrates a different range and mix of potential. Some are more creative, some are more capable of taking initiatives independently, and others are better at networking and so on.

We consciously make an effort to make these pedagogies interesting and inclusive with real life examples and situations. This elevates our students’ curiosity and attracts their attention to participate in the class activities with zeal, energy and enthusiasm, and make or belief stronger that “business school education helps, if you want to become a successful entrepreneur”.

About the Author: Muhammad Azam Roomi

Muhammad Roomi currently works as a Principal Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the University of Bedfordshire Business School. Roomi’s research, focusing on the growth and development of enterprises, has earned him international recognition: among others, he won the International Council for Small Business Best Paper Award in 2013.
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