Entrepreneurship is somewhat of a buzzword in education right now. It has become the 21st century version of the American Dream ideal. It is the belief that anyone from any walk of life can, with a good idea, strong work ethic, and positive mindset, make something of themselves. Everyone has the potential to be the next Bill Gates or Elon Musk.
That’s a total load of crap though, right? There are much more complex social factors in play that govern success in the US today. It’s not enough to have the entrepreneurial spirit. Plus, why is it assumed that being an entrepreneur is the american ideal? There are a great number of people who would prefer to have a good stable job that allows them to have a reasonable standard of living so that they can raise a family and so on. When I first started hearing about this entrepreneurship trend in education I couldn’t help but picture those swarmy kids in the business college at my university who just wanted to wear nice suits and “network”, whatever that means. It was all about business and not much else. |
Despite my initial qualms, in the past years as I have delved into 21st century competencies I have come to understand and respect the types of learning that can come from doing entrepreneurial work. I now see skills that can benefit anyone, no matter what their aspirations are:
RESILIENCE | The ability to move beyond failures and to learn from them. Do not look at failures as dead-ends but as detours. Fail early and fail often. |
INITIATIVE | The ability to start something when no one has shown you the way. To be independent. |
CREATIVITY & PROBLEM SOLVING | The ability to find unique solutions and to critically think your way through tough, complex problems. |
COMMUNICATION & COLLABORATION | Related to that dreaded “networking”. Entrepreneurship is not a solo endeavor. It requires working with diverse individuals and harnessing the strengths of the people in your network to achieve something great. |
These skill, plus more that I’m sure I can’t think of right now, are beneficial in any work environment. To be successful in the world it is important to be resilient, take initiative, and collaborate well. We need to move away from business-centric entrepreneurship as a goal in schools and move towards entrepreneurial thinking as a diverse set of cognitive goals.
What would a school look like that is built around entrepreneurial thinking? I had the opportunity of seeing this first hand when I visited Tiimiakatemia (Team Academy), an offshoot of the Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences. Tiimiakatemia is an immersive project based learning environment where students are placed in teams in their second year at the university and tasked with forming a company. A coach is assigned to their team to guide them, but their learning is largely self selected. They don’t take any formal classes; instead they engage in independent research, reach out to professionals in their field for guidance, and form study/discussion groups with their peers to support each other in their learning. The vast majority of their learning comes from running their businesses. To have a successful business they need to learn about marketing, accounting, client relations, etc. Once a month month, all students in the academy gather for a meeting where each team shares their company progress. It can be quite embarrassing when a group presents and they have a big fat ZERO for revenue. This is real money by the way. They have small start-up funds and some teams have brought in more than a million euros over their 3 years in the program. The teams have full control and ownership of their businesses so any profits go to the students. That’s some serious motivation for ya!!
Tiimiakatemia demonstrates the power of doing authentic work in schools. Learning can be extremely rigorous and motivating when the work being done is real. And it is important to remember that although these students are learning a lot about business and entrepreneurship, the most important learning is the underlying skills of collaboration, creativity, etc., that come to the surface when working on intensive projects in diverse groups. Yet high schools both in the States and Finland primarily still focus on textbook and lecture based learning in order to “prepare” their students for college and the real world. My host Janita at Tiimiakatemia shared with me that it is quite a shock for students when they first join the program. It takes months for them to learn how to be independent and to guide their own learning. Eventually the students thrive and the companies within Tiimiakatemia are quite successful, but imagine what could be achieved if they have been practicing these skills for years prior. And what about students who don’t have the opportunity to go through this program? Imagine if engineering students were pushed to work on cross-disciplinary teams. What could humanities or communications students gain from applying their content to solve tough problems? The potential for our students, schools, and society as a whole is great.