What's the real goal here?
American universities aim to prepare their students for their careers. European universities, especially public German universities, follow a primary goal to prepare their students for a career as well, but in academia, not in the real world.
This may seem nonsensical, considering that 90% of students won't pursue the path laid out for them. But our universities aren't businesses and thus aren't run like them. There are no repercussions if they don't do what most students want or need. Sometimes, you might even get the impression that universities try to do the exact opposite of what's in their students' best interest.
This reaches its extremes when it comes to teaching entrepreneurship. Here, it seems even more nonsensical to teach academic approaches and frameworks. But credit where credit is due: Most (though not all) universities have noticed that. That's why the approach to teaching entrepreneurship is already different from most other subjects. However, it is still taught within the rigid structure of academia, with the same tools as everything else. And if your only tool is a hammer, it doesn't matter whether or not you have realized that you are working with screws instead of nails if you are trying to hammer them nevertheless.
What is taught?
"The [...] counterintuitive point [about founding a startup] is that it's not that important to know a lot about startups. The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users and the problem you're solving for them." – Paul Graham
Just for fun, I scraped the entrepreneurship curricula of a couple of German universities and identified five general clusters among the modules:
- Innovation and Prototyping: Sounds good, but none of the modules teach Figma, low-code software prototyping tools, or hardware prototyping techniques. Most of them teach concepts and frameworks of corporate innovation. This is precisely the kind of "innovation" you will run around in circles as a startup.
- Entrepreneurial Strategy and People Management: Courses on leadership and brand-new concepts such as the blue ocean strategy, a book written 20 years ago for, again, you guessed it, corporate innovation.
- Specialized Topics in Entrepreneurship: Here, you are going to learn how to write a business plan (the most common entrepreneurship course, by the way), fill out the decades-old business model and value proposition canvas, and – if your university is more advanced - some industry-specific, startup-related stuff.
- Start-up Law: Modules on copyright, IP, labor law, trade secrets, compliance, blah blah blah. It is hyper-specific and of no value for most of the students in the class, but at least it's one of the exact clusters where facts are taught, unlike the three clusters before.
- Impact? You don't know what this means? Me neither. It's a collection on either sustainability entrepreneurship topics with the thesis that ESG measures are really important, or it’s what lecturers imagine to be Gen Z-tailored self-help modules to help students find something they want to work on.
The common denominator is that all of the above teach blurry content. Most focus on research results rather than real-life applications. Unfortunately, the research part isn't necessarily entrepreneurship research; it is just a knowledge transfer from management science. And why wouldn't the approaches made by multi-billion EUR DAX behemoths be a perfect fit for a pre-seed startup?
What should be done instead is to teach problem identification. How do you find a problem in your field that might be a good fit for a startup or a university spin-off? And even more importantly, how did other people find such problems and attempt to solve them? How did they fail? How did they succeed? This can be one course for one semester -- all you need right at your fingertips. You can then cut everything else and use the resources elsewhere, for example, to make this course outstandingly well.
You will figure out everything else on the way. That's how founding a startup works. At the end of the day, "entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down" (– Reid Hoffman). It's unpredictable and thus, it's more valuable to teach working in uncertain environments than learning about aerospace engineering theory.
Once your situation eventually requires specific knowledge, the responsible founder in your team can learn it when you reach the milestone you need it at. For example, when trying to raise a pre-seed round, one person can learn about CLAs and then forget everything about it again afterward. What good is it to have learned this in university if you must figure it out for your specific case again anyway?
Who is being taught?
Over the past 30 years, the data consistently shows that the majority of unicorn founders have a background in STEM or engineering. However, most attendees of entrepreneurship classes are business or management majors. This contrast underscores a significant mismatch between the subject and its logical audience. This is not a mere coincidence, and in my experience, it is not because business majors are just more interested in the topic. Yet, entrepreneurship is predominantly taught within the business faculty or universities' business schools, which open the course primarily to their students.
This topic-audience-mismatch can be explained by one of two things: Either an underlying structural intention exists to get more business majors to found companies, or nobody thought all that much about the students when making this decision. The first explanation seems unlikely; at least, I have never heard anyone articulate that in academia or elsewhere. This leads us to conclude that the decision might not have been made for the sake of the students.
When we now circle back to the thought of the primary goal of universities – preparing students for academic careers – the decision becomes a lot more understandable. It makes total sense to have entrepreneurship chairs at business faculties if you want to get business students into management science, not so much if you want your students to found great companies.
If the latter is your objective, however, you should adopt to teaching people from non-business backgrounds about entrepreneurship as the primary goal. I know firsthand how much can be done and achieved here since I built quite a successful business out of consulting especially technical university founding teams on startup creation. But obviously, I don’t want to ban all business majors from entrepreneurship courses. But historically, founding teams of great companies usually have a skill set that is an excellent fit for their company's MOAT. For Apple, for example, this was design. However, a team of mostly business founders only makes sense if your MOAT is distribution. But that has become rare in a post Rocket Internet era where the big unicorns build real tech instead of copying and scaling e-commerce.
Instead, entrepreneurship courses should be interdisciplinary. They should not be conducted by any one faculty but instead by independent startup centers, which most German universities have established anyway over the past few years. Furthermore, every program at the university, from STEM to Liberal Arts, should give their students credits to elect such a course. And since most applications for such a module will still come from business students (due to the historical structure), I suggest implementing an upper bound for management students in the classes of around 20%.
Not only does this structure ensure that students from all backgrounds will be taught to look for problems in their respective fields, but it also means that students will be able to step outside of their bubbles for a second and exchange ideas with different people. That in itself is a great way to find new problems to work on, but it also allows students to get to know like-minded people. Ideally, it helps form relationships, which could develop into becoming interdisciplinary co-founders and building something great together that people actually want.
Who is teaching?
Suppose your professor teaches scientific basics or even advanced empirical results at university. It doesn't matter so much whether or not the professor has discovered the topic at hand herself. What matters is, instead, the teaching ability of the person in front of the classroom. However, as soon as you teach experience-based topics, it doesn't make much sense to let an academic teach at all. Experience-based topics scream for a lecturer with, wait for it, experience in the taught.
If you are teaching problem identification and how to identify whether the problem might be something people care about, you need someone who understands that process inside-out. The practical thing is that – when following along with the ideas of the paragraphs on ‘what to teach’ – you could potentially cut down the entrepreneurship curricula to one or two courses. With the freed-up resources, you could hire one or two outstanding lecturers. Combined with a couple of guest lecturers, they could provide deep industry-specific expertise and share their first-hand experience on how they utilized their background to succeed and fail as entrepreneurs.
On a related note, this approach also holds up for startup consultants in university incubators. If you are a geography PhD employed by the university and have never seen a startup from the inside, who are you to tell the founding team of a deep tech spinoff how to raise their financing round? But of course, these are the results of structural problems and thus are not solvable overnight. Universities receive money from the state to build startup centers, and it's not in the university's interest to hire anyone else but researchers for whom there was no funding in other places.
Where to go from here?
The world of academia is characterized by inertia. Entrepreneurship teaching has evolved for over 10 years to arrive at its current form and it will continue to evolve from here. Luckily, to end on a hopeful note, the direction of future developments can be influenced.
Best equipped to realize changes are the universities and professors themselves, who I hope are open to the idea of questioning their own teaching objectives. The most entrepreneurial of them might even be open to disrupt themselves and help build something better. Unexpected help can also come from the outside in form of municipal, state or federal government. By reallocating funding incentives can change rather quickly, which is accelerating the establishment of the above-mentioned neutral startup-centers at many universities.
In the end, if our teaching institutions truly want to foster successful entrepreneurs, they must break away from rigid academic structures and focus on real-world problem-solving, interdisciplinary collaboration, and practical experience. By rethinking their approach and drawing from the expertise of experienced entrepreneurs, universities can create an environment where students from all disciplines are empowered to innovate, take risks, and build something meaningful. This shift will not only better serve the students but also help universities fulfill their potential as incubators of genuine entrepreneurial talent.