Graduate with a degree and a tech start-up: The vision of the Education

The best way to explain the vision of our MSc program is to start with the title of the book: "Graduate with a Degree and a Tech Start-up." Finishing a dedicated entrepreneurial degree with both might sound logical in theory but is, in practice, not logical at all. When looking at university initiatives around the world that involve entrepreneurship, only very few focus on graduating and creating the start-up as equally important outcomes of the education. To explain this, let us look into the three ways to teach entrepreneurship (reader warning: these three ways are not mutually exclusive; in practice, there is overlap between approaches).

First, there is education 'about' entrepreneurship. This way of educating informs students about everything there is to know about a topic, in this case, entrepreneurship. A huge positive element of 'about' education is that there are right answers, and thus knowledge can be easily examined, which is great when you want to be sure that assessment is proper. A typical exam question would be: In which year did Jacques des Bruslons first introduce the word entrepreneurship in Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce? a) 1689, b) 1723, c) 1778, or d) 1812 (when in doubt, always go for b).?

I guess you already sense that I am not crazy about this approach to education; a student obtains new knowledge, but that is about it. I remember from my primary and secondary education that many topics were taught like this. Especially Geography comes to mind for me: here is the world map with all its countries (let us not get into the discussion of what ‘a country’ is, hello Taiwan), and the task for me as a student was to remember them all. I can kind of see the point that there is some ‘general knowledge’ that clever people in policy decided should be possessed by everyone, and that teaching ‘about’ these topics is the most efficient way to get information across. But for our MSc program, my colleagues and I are completely not interested in teaching the general public about entrepreneurship. If your passion is to be an accountant for a large firm, fine, you do you. We built an education for those people who already got the entrepreneurial spark, and we want to support them to become better or even the best and actually create a start-up.

For this purpose, there is education 'for' entrepreneurship. This way of educating focuses on learning about the tools, methods, and techniques that can help to become (better) entrepreneurs. Many of these tools are not exclusive to entrepreneurship. Writing business plans, doing customer interviews, building prototypes, setting up user tests etc. are done by many more people than entrepreneurs. And this is great. Because it moves the discussion away from how to exactly isolate entrepreneurship (no idea why one would want to do this in the first place; many people who study to become an entrepreneur do not become an entrepreneur in the end, fine, most of them end up very well in other places) and focuses on how to actually get things done. You as an entrepreneur want to get to know more about your potential customers? Great, here are five tools that have been proven to give good customer insights when used properly. We will spend the next two weeks trying them out in class so you get a feel for them, how to use them, which one to use in what situation, perhaps even make adaptations and mix tools.

The issue with this approach is how many books on how to swim one can read before actually having to take a dive into the water. Yes, you can try out tools to obtain customer insights, create business models, and whatnot, but until your ass is on the line, until mistakes that you make hurt more than just your grades but your actual income, there is a lack of urgency.?

There is this great story about the New Zealander Nigel Richards who won the World Championship Scrabble in French, without actually speaking French. He simply learned the whole French dictionary, could lay down any French word on the scrabble board, but could not (or hardly) have a conversation in French. This is the extreme example of education 'for' something. There is a risk that by learning the tools so well, you become so aware of the opportunities and risks of each tool that you are never using them to its fullest extent in practice. These people become overpaid consultants or even worse: teachers. But they definitely do not become successful entrepreneurs.

That is why, finally, there is education 'through' entrepreneurship. This is basically the approach of: throw them kids in the water, and they will figure out how to swim. In entrepreneurial terms: just get started with your business and learn along the way. There is an argument to be made that the only way to become an entrepreneur is to be an entrepreneur. It combines really well with the education 'for', with the addition that there is a very clear sense of urgency now. When students want to do interviews to figure out what their customers want from their product, the students, for sure, want to learn everything there is to know about customer interviews. At the same time, they also realise that these interviews have to happen rather fast: business is moving. When mistakes are made in the first couple of interviews, students definitely want to reflect and read up on other approaches to make sure the next interview will be better. Reflection and connecting this reflection to literature: the keys of academic learning. This is what we want in our education: create your technology start-up and in this process learn on an academic level.?

Sounds logical enough, so why does this not happen on a large scale? When you read entrepreneurship education academic literature, there has been a call since the 1970s to have more education 'through' entrepreneurship. I am quite confident you can find a paper published every single year since then till today that makes this call for action. Why is it so hard for education to answer this call??

The answer lies in assessment. When I was a younger and more innocent teacher, I believed education was about students who learn something new. Now I am a bit older and a bit wiser and I know that education (at an education institute) is at least as much about justifying why students pass a course or not. Remember the multiple choice question of the 'about' education approach? That works perfectly for assessment: putting a number on how much Aaron has learnt and how does this compare to how much Bernard has learnt? Aaron answered 12 out of 50 correctly so he fails the course, Bernard answered 47 out of 50 correctly so he passes the course. Hard to argue with that logic.?

Education 'through' entrepreneurship is, by definition, dealing with messy learning paths, where learning outcomes are unknown upfront, and relevant literature and experiences unfold over time. It is goddamn difficult to justify why Claire passed this course when she only interviewed 3 potential customers but 'apparently learned a lot' and why Dora failed the course although she interviewed 20 customers and is actually in business now. We tell our students over and over again: success with your company does not mean success in your education, and the other way around. To learn on an academic level 'through' entrepreneurial activities, there needs to be a high degree of reflection of the students. And this reflection is hard to assess in both a meaningful and academically robust way. In the chapter The Academic Development, I explain how we try to ensure proper assessment in our program. I deliberately say here ‘try to’ because the truth is we also do not know for sure. Come on, if no one has figured it out exactly since the 1970s, it would be a bit arrogant of me to say that we did. We are clever people at DTU, but a bit of modesty is in place here.

So that explains the core vision of the program: by education 'through' entrepreneurship, students graduate with a degree and a start-up. I want to add three elements to this vision.

First: diversity. I hope and expect some of you are cringing when you read this word, but please let me explain. DTU is a technical university; our general population consists of rational thinkers who are predominantly male. I do not know of one entrepreneurial journey that has consisted of 100% rational decisions; hell, I would be surprised if the rational decisions even make it to 50%. In order to start a business, these bright engineers need to collaborate with ‘other-minded’ people, people who understand business, people who understand design, people who understand sales and so on. We need to get all these diverse people into our educational programs to maximise the chance of success. We need to convince the university to let these people in, and we need to find a way for these different thinkers to let them know that they can actually come to DTU, which is more difficult than it might seem.

Second, there was also a very practical reason to start this master education, both from a student and university perspective. Many students who get interested in the entrepreneurial path do that during their BSc education: they do some kind of project that they see potential in and they want to pursue that project, or, more likely, pivot towards another entrepreneurial project. Since their BSc education is in their domain, they often lack the entrepreneurial skills. They want to continue their project idea, need the entrepreneurial skills, and they still have potentially 2 years of university education, during which they have all the advantages of being a student. That is where we come in. All is very nice and start-upy, but in the end, a university is also just a business and gets money for every student who graduates; a bit of pragmatism has never hurt anyone. So there is value from a university perspective to let students graduate with a degree and a start-up. It allows the university to push up the graduation numbers, and use the start-up for communication purposes: this amazing start-up was started at this university.

On a final note, we want to be the best program in the world. Some might find this sounds arrogant, some might find this sounds meaningless. For us, it simply means to set expectations towards students and ourselves. For some educational programs, often situated at smaller universities in rural areas, teaching technology entrepreneurship mostly means giving students a taste of what entrepreneurship might be. There are only so many students who come to that university in the first place, and there is only so much innovation infrastructure around the university, so you will have to do with what you get. Having a couple of students develop a start-up to launch a stupid App for some stupid game might realistically be the best these programs can aim for. We find ourselves in Denmark, just outside Copenhagen, with many great small, large and multinational companies around, different universities with many bright minds, a political landscape that is pushing innovation and entrepreneurship by making money available for it, and very much diversity. All the ingredients are here to make teaching technology entrepreneurship in the best version possible. We want to allow ourselves to get the best students (I talk about what we mean with ‘best’ in the chapter ‘The Students') into our program, offer them the best education so they can start the best technology companies. Surely, we teach introductory entrepreneurial classes to all students, we serve the masses as well. But, for this program, we want to have the best students so they can develop the best technology start-ups in the world. Let’s see how to do that.