MBA PROGRAMMES Can Entrepreneurship and Innovation Be Taught


One of the key questions facing MBA programmes and business school students internationally is the issue of ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘innovation’.


What are these two masked strangers that have professors and students alike scurrying towards an array of books and academic discourses?


Why do the world’s leading business schools climb over each other to attract, often with eye-watering salaries, the finest entrepreneurship professors for their classrooms?


And why do MBA students fill their classrooms in such numbers?


According to the dictionary, an entrepreneur is “a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative, innovation and risk.”


In 1985, the influential economist, Peter Drucker saw innovation as “the specific instrument of entrepreneurship, the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”


As a result, many people are skeptical about the idea that one


can learn how to be an entrepreneur or an innovator in a classroom. They point to Ford, Carnegie, Rockerfeller, Branson, Buffet, Gates, Jobs, and to any number of brilliant and wealthy non-MBA educated innovators.


But for Jordi Montserrat, professor of entrepreneurship at the St. Gallen MBA in Switzerland, such MBA modules on business school courses are not about “creating entrepreneurs out of nowhere.


“What we can do is reveal entrepreneurial spirit and gear the students with the right methods and the right approach to their objectives. It’s about teaching


them the mindset that animates entrepreneurs.”


Teaching MBA students the necessary skills


For Professor Montserrat, the essentials to teaching in his field are exposing the MBA participants to the challenges of starting a business and, what he calls, the ‘entrepreneurial mindset.’


“The entrepreneurial mindset is the ability to go out of your zone of comfort and develop a passion or find out how to execute that passion into a business.”


“[Students] will run through business cases to make sure they’re


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