Going beyond teaching business skills to groom entrepreneurs

From Singapore to New York and beyond, teaching entrepreneurship to children as young as kindergarteners is one of the hottest trends, with parents and students seeing it as necessary in getting a head start on the path to success.

The Wall Street Journal recently described what is happening in the United States, where news of companies such as WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Twitter and Facebook being bought for billions of dollars or launching big-money stock listings has drawn younger children to classes, camps and other programmes that promise to develop entrepreneurial skills.

Here in Singapore, too, entrepreneurship training for students of all ages is thriving. From privately-run programmes such as MoneyTree, TiE and Entrepreneur-Adopt-a-School to entrepreneurship clubs in secondary schools, students have a plethora of choices.

However, the difficulty many of these programmes face is in going beyond teaching business skills to help students become entrepreneurs rather than shopkeepers.

It is not that there is anything wrong with shopkeepers. But for Singapore to power ahead, fostering entrepreneurs who think differently and create innovative businesses, such as BreadTalk founder George Quek, may well be more important than training students simply to manage their own boutique or spa.

FOCUS ON NEW IDEAS, NOT BUSINESS SKILLS

The results of one of the largest entrepreneurship programmes here, based on a proven model in the US, exemplify the successes and challenges.

Junior Achievement (JA) Singapore — a branch of a non-profit that started in the US in 1919 and counts Subway sandwich chain founder Frederick Deluca and Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller among its more than 100 million alumni worldwide — has grown from 68 students since it started here in 2008 to more than 20,000 participants today.

JA brings people from the business world into the classroom to teach entrepreneurship, work readiness and financial literacy, said executive director Ng Hau Yee. The aim is to get students to think out of the box by exposing them to entrepreneurs.

But the students and volunteer teachers may be focusing more on business skills needed for managing a company rather than on coming up with new ideas that solve problems.

Dr Colin Tan, a senior computer science lecturer at the National University of Singapore, described the approach at a recent forum: “I like to think of entrepreneurship as the act of identifying real or perceived problems and creating good, innovative solutions to address them. As an educator, I can initiate an entrepreneurial spirit in my students.”

CHALLENGES IN SINGAPORE

How can we teach students here to generate innovative business ideas?

JA’s Ms Ng believes that despite the organisation’s successful expansion in Singapore, fostering innovation and entrepreneurial skills in children here can be difficult. While children in the US look to earn money from an early age through doing chores, taking a newspaper route or operating a lemonade stand, the mindset is different here and Singaporean children do not do that, she said.

And when students here compete in JA’s regional business and trade competitions, she also sees a difference in their ideas and proposals, perhaps because students in other countries are used to overcoming difficulties, while Singaporean children are more used to a comfortable life.

“(Children from) some countries are very creative and you can see a viable business coming out of what they propose. It could be because if you don’t have many resources, you have to be more creative,” Ms Ng said.

What JA and other entrepreneurship programmes may need to do is take Dr Tan’s approach and focus more on developing an entrepreneurial spirit rather than teaching workplace skills. There are plenty of opportunities to improve how people learn, eat, work and play here, so it is about guiding students to come up with and design solutions that work.

One approach could be to take lessons from places such as the renowned Institute of Design at Stanford University and foster skills in brainstorming and creating ideas. Or if design thinking has become too linear and ossified, as Professor Bruce Nussbaum of Parsons The New School for Design sees it, tapping practices such as creative intelligence could help. Students could learn to analyse and uncover people’s real problems, brainstorm solutions over the course of weeks rather than in minutes or hours, test them out and use learnt business skills to commercialise the innovation — a process that focuses on creatively meeting real needs rather than just running a business better.

Organisations that seek to foster entrepreneurship may also need to be more innovative. For example, JA in California gives an award to staff for “demonstrating outstanding innovation and entrepreneurial spirit”. Encouraging outstanding innovation among volunteers here could make a difference. We should foster innovation by working with students over longer periods to identify problems, develop solutions and bring ideas to fruition.

At a time when innovation seems more important than before, programmes such as JA could be the key to developing the mindset shift that students need. JA, as well as possibly many other organisations teaching entrepreneurship, understands what is needed. Now, they will need to create approaches that go beyond business skills to instil an innovative spirit of creative entrepreneurship that can make more of a difference.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Richard Hartung is a financial services consultant who has lived in Singapore since 1992.