Editorial
entrepreneurship
You can’t teach that!
Can
you...?
ross Geraghty talks to Professor ed roberts of MiT Sloan about
entrepreneurship, innovation, business schools...and Babe ruth.
T
eaching entrepreneurship is a controversial exclude you from getting your hands dirty in the together. I can combine the theory and empirical
aspect of business school, leading some ‘real’ business world. Far from it. research with the practice and deliver that to
commentators to suggest that it is, in fact, students. I have been a professor at MIT since
an oxymoron. Can a top business school really Professor Roberts, you recently won the starting as an assistant professor in 1961, that’s 47
teach you entrepreneurship? Isn’t innovation Monosson Prize for Innovation Mentoring. years as a faculty member at MIT. I have a
something that you already have, or not? If you do What is your own innovation in the reputation for giving straight answers and strong
possess an entrepreneurial spirit, isn’t it better to education field? criticism but I also try to communicate some of the
spend the next 12-24 months developing your I have been involved in ten companies including knowledge of experience as well as the theory. I
skills in the real world than sitting in lecture rooms a Venture Capital firm, and been a founder role have built up quite a network inside and across
listening to people who, were they able to do it in a lot of those. I have been a board member of MIT. So I’m a faculty member in the Sloan school,
themselves, surely would be? twice as many companies, half of them public but the MIT Entrepreneurship Centre services all
Ed Roberts is one of the world’s leading companies. I worked with start-ups where there of MIT not just the management school. In the
academics in the field of Entrepreneurship and was one entrepreneur and nobody else, to boards outside world I also have a lot of connections.
Innovation (E&I) and the man who set up the E&I of companies with several thousand employees
Centre at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, a which traded on NASDAC. What’s your mentoring style like?
radical innovation at the time. In this interview In addition I am a real academic, which One of the things I can do to provide mentoring and
with TopMBA Career Guide Editor Ross Geraghty, means I read the academic research by colleagues coaching to students is to redirect them. I listen to
he says there is a definite role for business schools worldwide where they are studying what somebody is doing and say “I know someone
in developing the skills of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, so I look at the theory and the in another organization that you ought to talk to”
innovators; that being an academic does not empirical evidence that people are pulling and “here is what I think he could help you with.”
TopMBA CAreer Guide
www.topmba.com 67
MBA_FALL_08_pp_066-287.indd 67 14/8/08 17:29:21
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