Can entrepreneurship be taught?

I am not sure if you can teach a person to be an entrepreneur or not.  The process of starting a company is more an art than it is a science.  Like all forms of art, it requires one to practice the craft.  As any teacher of art knows, all one can do is help a novice avoid obvious mistakes and suggest techniques or conventions that have produced favorable results in the past.  With that as background, I want to share with you a sentiment that has finally been crystallizing into an observation for me. 

My sense is that Entrepreneur Education is too frequently about analysis and not about execution.  It tends to be "thinking" and not "doing."  Not only does that not give the students a favor for what being an entrepreneur is like, it can be a real deterrent.  What helped bring this into focus was a quote I recently read from my favorite French philosopher, Henri Frederic Amiel.  He observed ..."Analysis kills spontaneity.  The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more."

Imagine that you, as a student, have a "seed" of a good idea.  Could it get analyzed to death by "wiser more experienced business professionals" during an analysis activity or a business plan competition?  I am not too worried about this, because I most of us who interact with college students try to be positive and upbeat, but I am trying to make a different point. -->

We are rewarding the students for telling good, bullet-proof stories rather than for doing something!  We should not be surprised if we produce a bunch of accomplished bull-shitters and possibly a bunch of future liars. 

Now imagine that the rules were that you had to make progress toward launching a new business.  So you are judged in class and in collegiate competitions on what you have done not what you have thought.  

I have a few ideas on how this might be approached but I will defer to the talented bunch of educators to whom I have lobbed this rock.  I have talked about this pitfall as "Analyzing vs doing" but I could have called it the "spectator vs the athlete."    

Hoping that we encourage a few of them to "get into the arena," I close with another of my favorite quotes.  This one from Theodore Roosevelt: 

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."