What do you think are the things that can actually be taught in entrepreneurship? I mean it's not like teaching present value or finance theory, right? So what is it, what are the things that if you were to say that have academic content, the academic content behind entrepreneurship? >> So this is something that gets me very worked up. >> Okay. >> Is the [INAUDIBLE] entrepreneurship stuff, right. because we're in this interesting world where everyone's excited about entrepreneurship. So there's thousands of articles and news sites you can read and books you can pick up and personal stories you can hear, and I feel like what you get from a lot of this is what I consider to be wisdom. Right? >> Yeah. >> So the lived experiences of entrepreneurs trying to analyze their own past experiences and deliver them to you. And it's awesome, right? And useful and inspiring, but also has a downside which is that we know from research that people are not very good actually recalling their own experiences. They make stuff up, they make themselves more heroic, they come up with stories. And so the problem is that if you just rely on that material, you end up just getting the success as enough the failures and you get very curated answers. And we don't know a lot of things of an entrepreneurship, we have answers to some of these things. We have worked on how to pitch them. Is done it's absolutely amazing. It gives you answers to the questions that you have. How to innovate and what the value of ideas are. How you assemble teams and what impact that has. The choices that you make in terms of how you're dividing equity. All of these things matter a huge amount and we have answers to them. And that's part of what I hope we communicate when we teach this stuff. >> Mm-hm. >> I think my take on that is really similar. I think it absolutely can be taught, and what we see a lot of is these, you know, the top ten ways to pitch or the top ten things to include in your pitch deck. And what we can teach is that it's not just about those top ten things, it's about how do you actually apply that? How do you make it work for your own business? Your own product or service, or who you are as an individual. We hear in entrepreneurship a lot, what's your unfair advantage. So thinking about what's your own unfair advantage, and how do you use that to put together your own pitch for example. Because maybe you don't need those top ten slides. You know something that I talk a lot about in class is that when you're pitching, some people say start with the pain point. Start with how this is really disruptive. And then other people say you want to start with your team and how your team is well positioned. I think it really depends. If you have a really complicated product, for example, you want to make sure you can distill what that product is and explain what that is, because otherwise you're losing everyone and no one cares about why it's disruptive. Whereas on the other hand, if you're just taking the Uber to Pakistan, people get what that is, right? So now you want to try and explain and distill why is it going to work in Pakistan? How are we as this team uniquely positioned to do so? So I think those are the sorts of things that we can actually teach. Is how you actually take all of these things we know about entrepreneurship and make it apply to your own product or service or opportunity. So that's sort of I think my rational for why you can absolutely teach entrepreneurship and hopefully this course will provide students with that. >> My sense is that people who say that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, I suspect what they have in mind is that if you teach the principles of entrepreneurship to someone, but they don't entrepreneurial passion for something, they're not committed to execution in some way. You cannot be successful. And I suspect that's what they mean. But if you have somebody who has passion to solve something has an execution plan or can execute. The question is, what can you teach that person and I think there's a lot because if people have that then you can teach them certain principles that help them get there faster or perhaps even many of them fail because they didn't know a certain something, And so I think what people mean really is that you can just take a random persona and give them these principles and say hey, go build something. And it won't happen. It's not like programming in that sense. It's a bit different but I think certainly it can complement some of those other aspects that are outside of the knowledgebase, which is around personality and fashion and things like that. >> Entrepreneurship winds up being a combination of skill and luck, being in the right place at the right time with the right idea. We can't guarantee that we can teach someone to create a unicorn and be successful to that degree, but what we can guarantee is that we're giving the skills that increase the likelihood. Likelihood of success >> If there was a formula that we had, we would definitely be sharing that, but this is how you make [INAUDIBLE] >> I'm not sure we would share it. >> We wouldn't be here around the room, just empty chairs, right? [LAUGH] That obviously isn't the answer. It requires work from the entrepreneur to interpret what we have. It requires us to work to make bridges with what the entrepreneurs need but, we can increase odds, I guess, as everyone would say. >> I think the other thing that makes academics uncomfortable about teaching entrepreneurship that the reference disciplines are really varied. So we're talking about issues from organizational behavior, issues from information technology, issues from economics, issues from finance, most of us prefer our disciplines nice and tidy. And to teach within one nice and tidy discipline. And in entrepreneurship, you gotta pull the tools from lots of different disciplines. I think that's one of the other sources of discomfort. But it's also kind of why this has been a fun project. Right, because we are all from different areas and are able to bring to bear our specific expertise on the single topic of how to increase your Your chances of success as an entrepreneur. >> Yeah, I think that's really interesting actually that we all have very diverse sorts of frames for looking at the same, what we call, entrepreneurship. From a social psychology and an organizational behavior point of view, it's much more focused on the individual and the role of executing as an individual, whereas right From an econ and finance point of view. It's much more around the management of what's happening and how do you actually have the tool sets. And so I think that's a really interesting thing that we're all bringing here.
