Entrepreneurship: stoking an important engine of growth.

As an educator, my dilemma is that I have always believed that entrepreneurs cannot be created; they are born. I believed that this innate compulsion to start a business would manifest itself early in someone's life. One role of business schools was to foster the spirit of entrepreneurship in its students, which they would then take into the organizations that hired them, all the while knowing that the true entrepreneurs would identify themselves with or without an H.B.A. or M.B.A.

But fostering entrepreneurial spirit is clearly no longer as relevant a role for schools. As more people begin choosing (or are forced to choose) entrepreneurship as a career objective, they are looking to leading management schools for solutions to problems unique to entrepreneurial businesses. They are looking for answers related to specific issues, such as planning exit strategies. Entrepreneurs are so busy getting on with business, they find it difficult to find the time necessary for extra management study. The challenge for educators is to respect the role of research into entrepreneurship while continuing to teach practical skills and knowledge that will enhance the rate of success of these firms.

A few centres across North America are beginning to offer valuable insight. For example, the Ivey Business School's Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Growth is developing and implementing new models and instruments that capture and measure key issues faced by entrepreneurs. And equally important, this research is rapidly being turned into relevant knowledge and practical business solutions that are delivered in new programs and adapted curriculum.

Professor John Eggers, along with several colleagues, have been identifying the indicators that predict entrepreneurial performance. Not surprisingly, their recent findings show several significant positive relationships between CEO leadership behavior, management team performance, organizational culture and company financial performance. Top-performing companies - with higher levels of profits, sales and return on investment - had CEOs who showed higher levels of both frequency and quality of leadership/management behaviors. These CEOs scored higher on vision, ethics, human resource ...