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Who will mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs?
In Ireland they call them dragons; in Finland lions. They are tigers in Japan
and sharks in Israel and America. "Dragons Den", a British television show in
which entrepreneurs pitch ideas to wealthy and often scathing potential
investors, has spread around the world. But while the format might make for
entertaining viewing, business schools reckon it is little more than a pastiche
of the realities of being an entrepreneur. The next generation of dragons, they
say, are more likely to hatch in one of their incubators .
Business schools have been teaching entrepreneurship for decades and most
curricula now feature the subject prominently. But incubators are taking
business creation to a new level. EMLYON, a French school, is home to one of
Europe s oldest. It says the advantage of an incubator lies in being able to
concentrate resources for new and developing business ventures resources which
can include academic research and theory, day-to-day advice and support, an
alumni network, access to finance and even something as obvious but essential
as office space.
It seems to work. EMLYON says that only one of the 25 start ups it has nursed
to life in the past four years has gone under a considerably better success
rate than the French average. In the view of Michel Coster, the centre s
director, it is particularly useful for a new generation of entrepreneurs, many
of whom have science and technology backgrounds and clever ideas but little
real experience of the commercial world.
Of course dragons, battle-hardened businessmen from the real world, might
reasonably counter that these are exactly the sort of people who also need
their particular brand of help. But what the television show s follow-up
programmes also highlight is that the investors, with their money in the frame,
often quickly move from simply advising to telling their charges exactly what
to do. This is conspicuously absent from the business-school incubator model.
The Enterprise Hub at Warwick Business School, for example, maintains that it
is more "academic" in its approach than any angel investor is likely to be. It
purports to transfer knowledge from the school to the entrepreneur, rather than
supplying capital (and issuing commands) with the goal of realising an
investment.
Apparently, even dragons themselves seem to be coming round to the idea that
management schools may have something to offer entrepreneurs that goes beyond
proven experience of starting and building successful businesses. James Caan, a
fearsome dragon from the British series, built a commercial empire covering 37
countries without any help from academics or incubators. One of his first moves
after selling his business, however, was to take himself off to Harvard
Business School.