2010-12-21 12:09:07
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.