Are entrepreneurs born or made? A new podcast from the Ivey Business School, the Ivey Impact Podcast, explored that question with Eric Morse, executive director of the Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship, Powered by Ivey.
Morse, who is also special advisor on entrepreneurship to Western President Alan Shepard, studies “entrepreneurial cognition,” or how entrepreneurs process information and make decisions.
Ivey dean Julian Birkinshaw hosts the first season of the new podcast, a series called Dialogue with the Dean, where he sits down with faculty members to talk about issues that matter to today’s leaders.
Julian Birkinshaw (JB): We know entrepreneurship is a key driver of economic growth in Canada, around the world. You have been researching the topic of entrepreneurship for 20 odd years. So go back to your earlier work. You studied entrepreneurial cognition. What do we mean by that? What did you discover?
Eric Morse (EM): By “entrepreneurship cognition,” what we really mean is how do entrepreneurs process information perhaps differently than the general businessperson? And so that’s what we were really looking at and trying to figure out. How do you become an expert at something? Do successful entrepreneurs, those that have started maybe more than one business successfully or operated one for some time, see the world a little bit differently or see information differently?
JB: And these are characteristics like being more decisive? They’re less risk averse?
EM: It was really more around, ‘okay, I see the opportunity and I see the resources that I have access to. Given these resources, I know how to operate towards that opportunity.’
JB: What is it that the non-entrepreneur gets wrong? They don’t see the linkages between opportunity and resources? Or they’re just a bit too cautious about knowing what they’ve got?
EM: Yeah, a little bit on the cautious side. When we looked at some of the cultural things that we studied, obviously some countries had much more of a predisposition to entrepreneurship than other countries. But we did see patterns that were similar in every country. But willingness was where the businesspeople tended to not have those same cues. So, they could recognize resources, they had the ability to move things around, but they didn’t really have a desire to go out on their own.
JB: What gives people that willingness? Perhaps this gets to born versus made – are some people just naturally a little bit more prepared to go out on a limb than others?
EM: Well, what we found was it really came down to practice. And so that goes back to our expert modeling that we used in how do you become an expert in anything? Well, you tend to practice it a lot with a mentor or a coach who’s kind of been there and done it before. And what we found was it’s not just chess masters and basketball players and physicians, but also entrepreneurs. Failure is a great teacher. We never tell a student “that’s a bad idea,” but we ask tough questions. We assign them mentors who ask them even tougher questions, very often. But it’s okay that they go through that process a number of times. Each of those opportunities is a chance to learn. We really work hard on that and make sure that they’re connected to mentors as they go through this process. We have just great alumni. They’re mostly Ivey, but many Western as well, who give up their time to come back and work with the students. It’s fantastic.
“Failure is a great teacher. We never tell a student ‘that’s a bad idea,’ but we ask tough questions. We assign them mentors who ask them even tougher questions.” – Eric Morse, executive director of the Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship
JB: I shouldn’t lose the opportunity to mention the Ronald D. Schmeichel Building for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which literally just opened a couple of weeks ago. That’s right at the heart of Western. And you said that this is a space where you can see this as a sort of an incubator. Is that right? What do we do in that space?
EM: Good ideas come from the music faculty, the science faculty, the engineering faculty. You know, everywhere. And so how do we help them get that business acumen, go through the process, meet other like-minded students? It’s really a meeting place for likeminded people across campus. And we give them opportunities once they’re there.
JB: I like this. Because at business schools there’s a tendency to come up with lots of ideas, but to not really know what to do with them. And this is actually giving them the chance to take it to the next step.
EM: It is. The other beautiful part about the building is we have the accelerator (program). So, we have companies that are out there getting into the marketplace, and they really serve as role models to those students who are coming up with ideas. They get to see them and interact with them. It’s all about demystifying and giving people a sense of how do you get to that next step and meeting the people that do. It becomes much more likely for you to go down that road.
JB: I want to now dig specifically into how you teach entrepreneurship, literally in the classroom. Because there’s a worldview out there that says entrepreneurs are born not made, you can’t teach it. They look at the Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs and the Richard Bransons, the college dropouts, and because they dropped out and were successful, somehow the logic goes, that means that you shouldn’t teach entrepreneurship. I suspect you disagree with that point of view.
EM: As you might imagine.
JB: Indeed. So what is the mechanism by which you actually get people doing this?
EM: I usually answer this way: if you’re pushing me to say, can you make somebody a successful entrepreneur? My answer is no. I can’t give someone an elixir to drink. (But) we’re really good at pinpointing why something failed. So, if I can help you avoid these top 100 mistakes, I’m going to increase your chance of success.
JB: So essentially, we are structuring their thinking. We’re giving them ways of making sure that they, as you say, avoid the worst types of mistakes.
EM: There’s so many myths we try and overcome. One is, you go away in a garage, you work really hard and then you bring something to the world and you’re an instant success.It just doesn’t work that way. So, how do you get in front of customers more quickly and more often? Are you talking to industry experts that really understand the space? We push our students to go do interviews and do that legwork.
JB: What are your two or three top tips for somebody who joins one of our programs, and says, I really want to become an entrepreneur.
EM: Two things I would say: start doing it and find a mentor. And the mentor could be a faculty member. There’s a lot of our faculty in entrepreneurship that have run their own businesses. Utilize our network, which is amazing, and get a mentor from the outside. Then you have faculty plus mentors helping you through and helping you evaluate decisions and opportunities and moves forward. And I think those would be the two big things I would say is, is get in there and work at it. And it’s okay if you fail.
