Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#1 - Raphael Smals - The difficulty of teaching entrepreneurship
16 Plays5 years ago
Is teaching entrepreneurship possible and what are the challenges while doing so? In this episode, we’re discussing this topic with Dr. Raphael Smals (www.rsmals.nl). We focus on different types of institutions and their approaches in teaching important skills. We specifically look into what skills are necessary for an entrepreneur but not taught at all.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, what's up, everyone? This is Ajmal Zavari and welcome to another podcast episode. Our guest today is Rafael Smals. In this conversation, we talk about the difficulties of teaching entrepreneurship and if it is even possible. Enjoy.
Exploring Entrepreneurship Education
00:00:29
Speaker
Hey, everyone, and welcome to another podcast episode. If you're new here, my name's Ajmal. I'm a neuroscientist and entrepreneur. On this podcast, we explore the links between science, technology, business, and the impact they have on all of us.
00:00:45
Speaker
My guest today is Rafael Smals. Rafael is involved in many different projects ranging from organizing annual conferences where academia, business and government meet, to teaching courses in entrepreneurship and more. Our conversation focuses on the UX of teaching entrepreneurship from the perspective of the teacher.
00:01:04
Speaker
We dissect the topic and also problems with the current way and how it can be further improved. We start by first talking about Raphael's background so you can also see that he is the perfect person to talk to about this topic. If you want to reach out to him, you can find him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com slash i-n slash r-s-m-a-l-s or check his personal website at www.rsmal.nl.
00:01:32
Speaker
All right, enough background. Let's get into it, shall we? All right. Let's go then. You ready? I am. Okay. So, well, welcome Rafael. Thank you. Well, thank you for taking the time.
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, so this already, now that we actually started recording, feels much more stiff than the conversation we had before, which felt much more relaxed. It's interesting, isn't it? But it's going to disappear. It's OK. I hope so. We're going to relax. Yeah. So yeah, today I wanted to talk to you about basically the UX of teaching entrepreneurship from the perspective of the teacher.
Rafael's Background and Entrepreneurial Journey
00:02:11
Speaker
not from the ones that actually want to become entrepreneurs or for whatever other reasons, they're taking that class. Well, in all honesty, we have met in the Galdaland Startup Accelerator where I was a student and you were the instructor. Two years ago, yeah. That's always been two years ago. It's been two years, yeah. We had these drinks a few weeks ago and that was when I realized it was already two years. It doesn't feel that long.
00:02:40
Speaker
No, no. Even though now, when you say two years, it's clear. It makes a bit more sense, I mean, in my mind, because so much has happened. So much has happened on both sides. On both sides, yeah. And if all that has had only happened in one year, I think that would have been unhealthy. Yeah, maybe. It would have been a lot of work, at least, yeah. Now, I have a question for you, and this is...
00:03:08
Speaker
This has nothing to do with the purpose of this podcast at all. This was just a personal curiosity. Which is, you know, ever since we met each other, and just like now, you always have a smile on your face. I've never actually met you without a smile on your face. And in my research, and for the preparation of this,
00:03:32
Speaker
I found a situation where you did not have a smile on your face. Really? Which is the photo at the end of your PhD thesis.
00:03:45
Speaker
All right, I don't have my pieces at hand here, so I'd have to look for it. Do we have that photo somewhere? No, I was very surprised, actually. If I recall correctly, I think it was a self-portrait that I made at some point.
00:04:02
Speaker
You know, I don't work that well on camera, I suppose. It's an audio blog and it's not a vlog. No, I mean, all the other photos that I found were totally okay. It's just smiling and the angle and lighting is good. But that one, it looked like you were done with it. It is probably because I took it myself. And it's like the other photos I generally, not actually the ones on my LinkedIn, I think I
00:04:28
Speaker
I need to update it as well. It's kind of a sensitive topic, you know, photos of me. I work better behind the camera, not in front of it. I mean, yeah, I mean, your passion is photography, right? It is in the old fashioned way. So, chemistry, getting my hands wet, literally. There's somebody on an online forum, his subtitle is, real photos are born wet, and I really subscribe to that. I just like the tangible aspect of it.
00:04:54
Speaker
Yeah. So it's my passion. It's my hobby. I spend a lot of time on it. If I'm not teaching entrepreneurship to people or other stuff. But that's good. So then what I would like for the listeners is to, I mean, I know your background now very well. At least I'd like to think so. You did some research. But the listeners don't. And I just want them to realize that you are really the perfect person to talk to about this.
00:05:19
Speaker
So from a very young age, you already started to work with IT. I did. Because your dad, he ran a small IT firm. And well, can you tell me a bit about that IT firm and especially the jobs that you did?
00:05:35
Speaker
The jobs that I did. Okay, so let's go back to way back before I was born because I look a lot like my dad and we have one thing in common, which is that we don't work that well within a fixed organization, I suppose. So we need to have a sense of freedom and
00:05:54
Speaker
the ability to do our own things and follow our own roots. And that was true for my dad as well. So this is also why he had an IT firm. He had been in IT actually since it first became a thing, at least in the Netherlands. So he started working in that sector in the early 1970s, around 1970.
00:06:13
Speaker
There was in corporate environments, then there was an economic downturn in the 1980s, and that was basically, this is a long story short, but that sparked his own entrepreneurship. He started making software for administrative purposes, for industrial users, bakeries and stuff. So that was what I witnessed in the early 1980s, my dad building code and putting on a suit and going to the customer and implement all that kind of stuff.
00:06:41
Speaker
And selling hardware was something that came with it because the software needed to run on something, so he needed to import the hardware and sell it off. And it was kind of a sideshow. And then come the 1990s, the sideshow became the main theme. I mean, hardware lifted off, computers became affordable for home users.
00:07:03
Speaker
So his business kind of shifted from building custom-made software to delivering hardware to private users, corporate users. And these were usually like really domestic users up to small, medium enterprises, schools, educational institutes, usually not the really big organizations. But it went hand in hand with the PC revolution.
00:07:24
Speaker
It went absolutely hand-in-hand with the PC Revolution, and you have to keep in mind that back in those days, 1990s, the product was not commoditized the way it is right now, so it was not really an off-the-shelf product. So he basically bought the components and then assembled, built an order, and also built the specifications that met the needs of the customers. So everything was really custom-made.
00:07:49
Speaker
And that was still possible because you still had the financial slack and there was the profit margin still allowed to do that, to put in that kind of effort. This was a really small operation. It was like just my dad and a few guys helping out once in a while, maybe a few times a week if there was a lot of work.
00:08:11
Speaker
This relied on passion, personal interest in the technology. We had a subscription to CT magazine. It still exists. It's a German magazine. Yeah, I know that magazine very well. Exactly. You come from Germany, so you're obviously familiar with it.
00:08:29
Speaker
Even, you know, back then, I'm not sure I haven't read it in a while, but it was really the best for in-depth information on what's new and what's hot. So there was kind of the stuff that, as a kid, so here the story becomes a bit more personal. As a kid, I always looked forward to actually receiving the new CT magazine. I think it was biweekly, so two times a month.
00:08:52
Speaker
And we got it. Obviously in German, there was a Dutch translation was like super thin. We didn't use that. So I learned to read German through actually reading a CT magazine. That's beautiful. I think I understood like 40% of it. So it was not too bad. That's pretty good.
00:09:09
Speaker
It was good enough. I must have been like 12, 13, 14 years old. Obviously, having the company literally at home, we were living between the boxes of monitors and mainboards and keyboards.
00:09:28
Speaker
You get infected with it in a way. And I remember that when I was 15, my dad took me on sort of a business trip. Basically, he had just sold a 100 megabit network.
00:09:43
Speaker
to a customer in The Hague. And 100 megabit back in 1994. So that was fast. This was not a regular Ethernet. This was 100 VG from HP. It was also a niche product.
00:10:00
Speaker
They had all these fancy PCI cards in the server and in the workstations. Long story short, the network card in the server didn't work. You have to keep in mind this was the days of MS-DOS and I think the server was running a novel network.
00:10:19
Speaker
And they didn't get it to work. HP support was cold. They weren't able to help either. And as sort of a last resort, I didn't know much about computers anyway. I knew a command prompt. And my dad said, why didn't you give it a try? And I was like, I had no idea what I was doing, but I was fiddling for 10 minutes or so. And then for some magical reason, it worked. And everybody was like, how did you do that? And I said, I don't know.
00:10:48
Speaker
And I thought, but I need to find out. Which is what many more IT people actually should admit from time to time. I don't know. I don't know. No, but this was trial and error. And I learned the scientific method years, a decade later. So I just did something, make it up as I went along. And that's where it started. So it was 15. And from that point on, I became to work systematically in the business, assembling computers.
00:11:17
Speaker
advising people and mainly a lot of troubleshooting. That's what I did until the early 2000s. Then my dad turned 65 and he said, well, I'm going to quit. I've worked enough in my life and the choice is up to you. I was in university back then studying information management. My dad basically gave me the choice, I'm going to stop the business.
00:11:47
Speaker
So I'm going to kill it, maybe
Career Transition and Academic Pursuits
00:11:49
Speaker
sell it off or something. It was a really small business. Or I'm going to give it to you to play with, basically. And I said, it's nice to do next to my study. And I'm not going to study full time anyway, because that bores me. So I'll do the nice customers and the high value added things, and basically get rid of the rest, and basically let it bleed.
00:12:14
Speaker
a little bit and just keep maybe 20% of the business. That's what I did for a few years, along with my studies, sort of have a play thing and earn a little money with that. It was not that much, but it allowed me to do the fun stuff.
00:12:31
Speaker
And of course, by that time, the market became more of a commodity. More standardization. More standardization. There was still a little niche where I could focus on very high value added customers, architects, that kind of business. They had very specific requirements. But I foresaw that that was a temporary thing as well within a few years that would end.
00:12:57
Speaker
Basically, by the time I went to do my master's degree, my research, I decided I'm going to focus full-on on that research for six months and then find a real job, something like that. That was basically the end of the business. We basically let it taper out. In the end, I sold off the contacts to another small company, a guy living nearby.
00:13:25
Speaker
And I said, like, here's the customers and, you know, take good care of them. Right. And I'm not really sure if you did, but I hope so. So then, I mean, you also mentioned that you then studied information management while you partially were still playing with that company after your dad retired. You then actually did research at a nuclear power plant, which I now actually find interesting that you said your dad still does that now stuff for nuclear power plants.
00:13:51
Speaker
We inspired each other. I got the opportunity. It's not something I went to a nuclear power plant and then asked, so kind of nose around a little bit. But it was actually a PhD research of somebody else, Gert von Eide. I think he still works in academia in Belgium. And he was doing his PhD in Tilburg at the moment, at the time. And for data collection, they had this idea that they could bring some master students along to do interviews.
00:14:21
Speaker
In the end, we ended up doing these interviews together. We went to the power plant. It was dual nuclear power plant near Antwerp in Belgium. I think I visited the place four or five times. I don't really recall. It's been 10 years. It was insanely interesting, not just because of the organization itself, but also because of the technology underlying it. I wanted to understand all of it. I read all I could get my hands on about nuclear power plants.
00:14:48
Speaker
And my interest in terms of my thesis topic was about the reliability of a nuclear power plant and particularly the maintenance organization around that. So it was also super important. I was also super interested in any kind of failure method. So I read everything I could about Three Mile Island, about Chernobyl. Fukushima, of course, hadn't happened back then, but I read up on that as it happened as well.
00:15:18
Speaker
So there was kind of, yeah, it captured my interest in one side, the technology aspect of an organization like that. And on the other side, the societal or the organizational aspect. And that is a common theme throughout my career. Right. Now I agree. At least that's what my research also suggested.
00:15:42
Speaker
Yeah, you can see it in every aspect. Yeah, because after you did that, then you went, you gather more industry experience working at ASML. I actually have no idea what ASML stands for, but it's a huge company.
00:15:58
Speaker
It's the acronym is a difficult one. Maybe there's an official reading these days. But back then, I was told that there was no clear official definition for it. Maybe we should not say that so loud for the marketing department. I don't know. I'm probably wrong. The market department knows best. That's true. That's true.
00:16:16
Speaker
I always thought it was something like advanced semiconductor manufacturing lithography or something like that. It would make sense. It was good enough for me. Yeah, exactly. And after you did that, basically spending
00:16:32
Speaker
studying, but also having all this experience in industry. After that, you actually decided to make the jump to academia, and then you did your PhD. It was kind of decided for me. Well, obviously, it's a few countries, so we might make our own choices.
00:16:52
Speaker
I tend to go with what people suggest me, if I trust them. So I was working at ASML in supply chain management, which was really a one-year project. So this one-year contract, and after that, I was basically thinking about what should I do next. So towards the end of that term there, my boss at ASML, he had these contacts in Nijmegen.
00:17:13
Speaker
And he said there's two professors and you should talk to them because they have this research program and there's one spot for a PhD student and we also have an interest in that as a company but at a personal level he said I think this is the right option for you to consider. He also had done his PhD in Eindhoven so he knew what he was talking about.
00:17:36
Speaker
So I went to have a chat with these professors and basically I don't remember much of it. It's been a while but we talked for about an hour and these were two elderly gentlemen. I mean they were close to their pension age and they were very friendly and there was not a lot of stress and they
00:17:53
Speaker
we just had a nice conversation. And I remember at some point one of them asking, so do you like to read? And I said, sure, I do like to read. And in my memory, it was a bit like, OK, you're hired. It's good enough. Probably it was a little bit more strict than that. And probably they did actually look at great lists and stuff. But for some reason, I got hired for that. And they had enough confidence in me.
00:18:22
Speaker
And I went to do my research, partly also at ASML, so there was also that company interest in it, which was about how do you collaborate on a long-term basis with your suppliers if you're a high-tech manufacturing firm, and particularly if you want to outsource innovation work, how do you manage that on a long-term basis as the technology evolves and the relationship evolves along with it.
00:18:49
Speaker
So basically, I was trying to get a grip on the dynamics of these kinds of biosupply relationships. Right. And after you finish your PhD, you went into teaching.
00:19:00
Speaker
I also went into teaching, I also went to work for one of the firms that I had investigated, so I kind of did a teaching and consultancy thing, and I kind of kept doing that over the years that followed. So basically we're now in the present. But teaching has become an even more important component of my work.
00:19:19
Speaker
I still do that a lot. And again, when I was doing my PhD research, obviously I needed to know something about doing research. And in Tilburg, studying there, I never really got any course in research methods. So I was hired to do a PhD research.
00:19:38
Speaker
And I had no idea about doing research. Oh, really? I didn't. And I ended up doing qualitative research, which I knew, well, I kind of knew in advance it was going to be like that. So one of the first things I thought was, OK, let's follow a research methods course. And I happen to be one at the management faculty for bachelor students. I was a PhD student, and I went to sit with these bachelor students in the classroom.
00:20:07
Speaker
and just listening on these courses. And then after, it was very educational, I learned a lot of things and it gave me a little bit more confidence and I could actually do that. And then after I finished my PhD, one of my former colleagues was already teaching there in that same course that I had attended. And he said, we need somebody to teach some work groups and are you available? And I said, well, sure, I can give it a try, but you know, research methods kind of do that. And isn't it very boring?
00:20:35
Speaker
But, you know, I just didn't. I do remember that my first workgroup, I had a group of all guys, 30 guys sitting in front of me, bachelor students, 20 years old, something like that. It was Thursday morning, quarter to nine, and I said, okay, if you look at a block of courses, there's always one or two courses that really interest you.
00:20:56
Speaker
you know, when you start the blog. And there's the rest of the courses you kind of think mad, maybe interesting, maybe not. And there's one or two courses that you think this is not going to be good.
Teaching Entrepreneurship: Challenges and Approaches
00:21:07
Speaker
And I say, OK, so who thinks this is one of the more interesting courses? Obviously, no hands wind up. And I say, OK, I'm not going to ask you if you think this is the course that's basically going to suck, but I'm going to guess that this is what you think. And they say,
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is basically the truth. I said, well, I would have been the same way. We will have to make it out of the woods together. Exactly. So, you know, at first glance, this is not my favorite topic, but let's see how far we get. And of course, by then I had already realized it can be much more interesting.
00:21:45
Speaker
then it seems at first glance and I actually started to like the topic so I've been doing that for a few years now also in different places and it kind of fascinates me how people do things and how you how do you do something you know processes procedures having different options different scenarios and choosing between them my research methods is about that as well
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah, in the end. No, and I mean, just just based on what you said on your the experience you had with your dad, how the company grew, how you had to take over. I mean, or no, let me say how you were allowed to take over. Or also on that business trip, having all these different experiences from putting a computer together, doing your R&D by reading basically the CT magazine, which was in German. It was it was our R&D. And then
00:22:36
Speaker
doing the customer relationships and troubleshooting, going there yourself, actual interaction, and also experiencing sales. I mean, this is a host of experiences normally people don't get. And that was from a practical perspective. It was a practical perspective. I had no idea what I was doing.
00:22:57
Speaker
Yeah. And it also included doing the financial administration, doing purchasing, doing software engineering, because this was also the internet boom. So I made a content management system and sold that to a couple of customers as well. Really making it up as you go along. But that's what I mean. I mean, just that experience you have industry-wise. Yeah.
00:23:21
Speaker
or let's call it the practical actual implementation experience. And now also teaching entrepreneurship, I think you're the perfect person to talk to about this. And I hope now everyone's convinced on the other side as well. But for them to also know, and I'm curious as well, what other types of courses or workshops have you taught that were targeted at entrepreneurship?
00:23:47
Speaker
Well, actually, not all that much, but you see entrepreneurship popping up in different ways, in different courses. So you should actually have to break it down. What is entrepreneurship? And it's a set of competencies and also maybe a part of identity of somebody. And in that sense, it sort of emerges in all the teaching that I do, but usually it's not even called entrepreneurship specifically.
00:24:12
Speaker
The kind of teaching I do is, for example, the research methods, but let's keep that out of it because it's really academic. Then I do some teaching on the interface of innovation management, society, and general business management. This can also have to do with energy policy.
00:24:37
Speaker
This is a part of a course that I teach at a business school in France, which is basically about making students aware of the energy transition and also the role that public policy plays in that. And how do you deal with that as a company, as an organization? So I basically let them imagine being part of a company and also being in the position of government and making policy.
00:25:03
Speaker
And of course that is also about the strategic direction of companies and what I basically make them do as well is position themselves in a company and then looking at the world around them and trying to create a vision for the future.
00:25:21
Speaker
Now, what is going to happen to the world of energy, both generation, distribution and use, things like the energy mix? And if you are, for example, an oil producing company, what does that mean for you for the future? And what are your options? What are the scenarios? How are you going to respond to that?
00:25:40
Speaker
So it's a course about energy policy. That's what it's called. But it's in effect, it's really very much about strategic orientation and trying to interact with the network of stakeholders around you, including governments, but also the general public.
00:25:56
Speaker
So in a sense, that's not very much different from what an entrepreneur does. And you may recognize these things also from the accelerator that we did, where we have basically similar content. They were just named slightly differently, but the core is the same. It is named differently. The content is very, very similar, but of course it's tailored towards the audience, and well, so practical things. But the content is the same.
00:26:23
Speaker
And of course, there's the entrepreneurship accelerator that we do, and very closely associated with that is a sort of micro accelerator that I do with, I've been doing that for three years now with communication science students. And so they're part of the social sciences faculty in Nijmegen, and they have like a one day workshop, it's even less than one day, it's a two hour workshop.
00:26:49
Speaker
Where I actually explain them what entrepreneurship is so they sign up for it right so they have these three options and one of them is entrepreneurship or it's actually called writing your business plan and so you know communications.
00:27:04
Speaker
And so writing your business plan, and I talk to them about entrepreneurship, sort of, for two hours, and then they start writing their business plan. And I always start by saying, okay, we're not really going to write a business plan, you know, for starters, because that doesn't make sense in my mind. So that's really very much about making people aware of entrepreneurship and what it involves, and also about different forms and that you don't actually have to start your own company to become an entrepreneur.
00:27:32
Speaker
Because that's one of the misconceptions that entrepreneurship is about becoming the next Bill Gates and driving your Tesla down the road and making lots of money because you have some fancy tech product that you developed. It's kind of the image that people sometimes have of entrepreneurs or maybe even the small town entrepreneurs that you walk down the street and they have these shops and those are entrepreneurs. Those are entrepreneurs as well.
00:28:01
Speaker
But I've met a whole lot more entrepreneurs working in larger organizations that who don't have entrepreneur on their business card. Right. That's also weird thing to put on your business card, I think.
00:28:14
Speaker
Yeah, but it will be nice, you know, particularly if you're a serial entrepreneur and actually can have one business card with serial entrepreneur and serial killer and then, you know, try to pick one and what capacity do we meet? Or you could have serial entrepreneur and then you know, these tick boxes underneath to have 10. And let's see how far how many do you have already? Exactly. And that's the card you then hand out. Oh, that would be nice. Yeah.
00:28:40
Speaker
I actually have to go around your contacts if you have one more entrepreneurship that you start and you have to take one more. Anyway. From all these students that you taught, it doesn't have to be named entrepreneurship course, but courses where you think principles of entrepreneurship were taught, or maybe even where you think students came to these courses
00:29:05
Speaker
directly for that content and just for that content. How many of those do you... I mean, it's just a guess. I don't expect it to have a perfect percentage of three decimal points. No. But how many of those do you actually think became entrepreneurs as in starting their own business?
00:29:27
Speaker
It's a it's a work in progress, obviously, because my teaching experience is, of course, limited to the past like five or six years. But while funny anecdote, I asked a group of French students at a business school a few months ago, I asked them, so what do you intend to do after you finish this degree? So who's going to become a consultant?
00:29:52
Speaker
actually one or two hands went up. Which surprised me because I had expected it to be more. Then I asked whom of you is going to be a manager and then virtually all hands went up. So that was basically their future perspective. Just go into management and then I asked who's going to work for themselves and nobody replied.
00:30:12
Speaker
If I project that or if I take that to different contexts where I've been doing teaching, if I had to do my estimate in the Netherlands, if I do teaching, it's usually a bit more. I would say maybe 10% to 15% have a vague ambition of maybe starting a business at some point. That's more than I thought.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, well, that would be, but if you asked how many actually do start, and then it's probably below 5%. But actually have an active, and maybe there are some bias. So I mentioned these communication science students, and they actually chose the topic writing your business plan. So they are inclined to be a bit more interested in actually becoming entrepreneurs. But even in that population, I asked them, so how many actually do you have,
00:31:03
Speaker
how many of you actually have the plans to become an entrepreneur? And it was a very small minority. It was still in a group of 30 people, it's like six or seven hands going up. Which kind of puzzled me because I thought, well, you chose the session to write a business plan. Exactly. That's also what puzzles me as well. So when I've been teaching some courses, I like to ask at the beginning,
00:31:31
Speaker
What are your plans? What do you want to get out of it? Maybe where do you want to go? And even if your answer is, I don't know, I think that's a perfectly valid answer. I'd rather have you say that than trying to make something up on the spot. Exactly. It's fine. Yeah. So then in some courses I taught, I had students there that said, no, I want to start my own business. I want to do this and I want to do that.
00:31:54
Speaker
And what went through my mind, unfortunately, was, well, then you're definitely in the wrong course, unfortunately. Absolutely. Which saddens me to say, because they have been told, this is the place where you can learn that.
00:32:12
Speaker
Maybe they have been misinformed or maybe they have learned something since signing up about themselves. This is also possible. I mean, we know each other from the accelerator. And one of the purposes of this accelerator in my mind, and maybe this was not the official purpose, but kind of it was understood also between the trainers, that one of the good outcomes of that accelerator is also, if somebody recognizes, I am not an entrepreneur.
00:32:41
Speaker
Yeah, of course. I should not be doing this. Or I should be doing it, but I need a little help with this. I need people who are complementary to me. And I think it's the same thing with a course. It's perfectly fine if somebody follows a research methods course with me and then decides, OK, I'm not going to be an academic researcher. And in fact, this is 99% of my students in research methods. Say at the end of the course, very interesting. Thank you very much. Really helpful for writing my thesis.
00:33:09
Speaker
But this is not something I want to be doing the rest of my life. And I said, well, it's totally fair and totally to be expected. And obviously, then it's also a mission to not make something like that a burden to students. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you come to an entrepreneurship class and you walk out knowing more than before and being able to make a better decision for your own life,
00:33:35
Speaker
it was fully worth it. Then it's worth it. Exactly. And so that is the added value of these kind of courses. Right.
00:33:46
Speaker
Yeah, so my next question would be, from your perspective, why did those students then enroll in that class? And I think now, having reflected on that a little bit, that might be even impossible to answer. Some might have been misinformed. It's impossible to answer, so it will be pure conjecture. But I can answer in an abstract sense, I think. And maybe I will be speaking a little bit for myself and the things that interest me.
00:34:16
Speaker
But I think, for example, looking at that group of students, the writing and business plans workshop students, they
00:34:28
Speaker
I noticed that they have a very strong interest in issues related to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. If I tell them a story about changing the world, which is basically what my teaching is about,
00:34:47
Speaker
If you were to ask me why do I teach, I would say I'm a lazy person. I like to change the world by telling others people to change the world. This is exactly what I try to let them do in this business plan writing session. If I start talking about changing the world and also about corporate social responsibility and responsible entrepreneurship,
00:35:12
Speaker
They really, they physically sit up and listen. So this really appeals to them. And that really also comes back if you ask them, so what kind of plans would you have in terms of entrepreneurship, which is of course also part of the workshop that they develop a plan.
00:35:29
Speaker
It's very often about these social engagements, like how do we help the elderly to remain connected to the rest of society to make, for example, the use of social media easier for them. These kinds of things. So I think it's a sense of idealism.
00:35:51
Speaker
If I look at the students in France where they have this energy policy course, it's again the same thing. They have some interest in the energy transition. They know something is happening to the planet and whether it's about just good business sense that you have to do something about that or it's about idealism that you actually want to contribute in a positive way, but they're interested in how can we make this change.
00:36:19
Speaker
And I think that is a general motive that everybody to some extent does have the ambition to change the world. Maybe we're not always explicit about it because it's kind of a big ambition, but I think everybody wants to change the world in a minor way.
00:36:36
Speaker
Well, it's totally fine. It's totally fine, because if we all do that, it is changing. And if somebody changes it in a major way, it's still fine. Hopefully for the better. For the better, that would be nice. Yes. No, I can see what you mean. I think it's learning.
Educational Institutions and Industry Collaboration
00:36:55
Speaker
learning entrepreneurship doesn't necessarily have to mean you become an entrepreneur. It's a set of tools you've been given. Yeah. And these tools are universally applicable. Exactly. And it does not have to mean you have to start your own business to use them. No, you can also do that while you're working at a company and maybe trying to get a promotion. Absolutely. It's a very similar tools or how to work together and all of that.
00:37:24
Speaker
Fortunately, there's of course a name for it. Then we call it intrapreneurship. This is one of the things that I make very explicit in my teaching on entrepreneurship as well. Look, you don't have to start your own business and go to the Chamber of Commerce to register and stuff just to be an entrepreneur. If you want to change the world, you can choose the position from where you're going to do it.
00:37:47
Speaker
if it's going to be your own business or an existing organization. That's the question of, I would almost say, the business model that you choose for your personal entrepreneurship.
00:38:01
Speaker
But then what would you say that you, so you have, you mentioned you're teaching the classes in France. You do that in Nijmegen at the Radbau University as well. We were at the Accelerator together. You had another iteration of the Accelerator, lots of connections with the startups seen within the Netherlands as well, because it was directly coupled location-wise with a second iteration at least.
00:38:26
Speaker
What do you think is actually the biggest problem, and now nobody can see it, but in quotation marks, teaching entrepreneurship?
00:38:37
Speaker
That's a tough one. I haven't done market research on courses or education or tracks on entrepreneurship, so it's kind of difficult one. But just from what you have seen also. From what I've seen, what I've heard. I think there's... Okay, I'm going to go...
00:39:02
Speaker
simplifying matters to the point of being dangerous, okay? We can always backpedal afterwards. Exactly. You can always cut it out. Nuance can always be added. Exactly. We will need nuance later on, trust me. We're simplifying things to a stupid extent. You have one stream of teaching entrepreneurship which basically comes down like, look,
00:39:29
Speaker
I've been reading a little bit about teaching entrepreneurship and I've had my own business and I will tell you how it's done.
00:39:38
Speaker
Basically, with an N equals 1. Exactly. Trust me, I know what I'm doing. I earned a Tesla, no matter if they just basically lucked out with good market conditions and stepping into the right market for some kind of weird reason. And then based on that experience between quotation marks, telling people how they should be doing it.
00:40:02
Speaker
Again, dangerously simplified, but this is the more pragmatic approach. I've met these types of people. Yeah, and I'm not saying that you should not be listening to them, because in many, many things, they will probably be right.
00:40:18
Speaker
But from an academic viewpoint, you can always ask, so how solid is this conceptually? You should ask that always. I think you should. At least you should ask yourself, do I understand it at a conceptual level and does it still make sense at that level?
00:40:35
Speaker
Then we can take it actually as a nice bridge to the other side, which is teaching entrepreneurship from an economic perspective, which is like, okay, we've done the NIS 3000 studies. And we know based on these statistics that successful entrepreneurs are people who take these in these boxes.
00:40:57
Speaker
And they make a business plan that consists of these and these elements. And then we see that in this percentage of cases, the success follows.
00:41:08
Speaker
Hence, you should be doing, well, firstly, you should start by being born as this and this kind of person and then make this and this kind of business plan and then manage your business in such and such a sort of way. And then everything should, you know, it's an alignment for success and no guarantee of success, but there's a good chance of success.
00:41:32
Speaker
And again, I think that is, if you take that as gospel, it's obviously dangerous because, okay, then statistically your chance of success is gonna be indeed, what is it? 17% or something? I don't know. What is the failure rate of new businesses? It's remarkably high, okay? Higher than 50% generally. Okay, then you're gonna fall into that. What is it percent bracket?
00:42:00
Speaker
Or maybe not, and your business is going to fail. Obviously, what you want is that in your N is one case, your business is going to succeed. And I think neither perspective is going to be helpful. So either looking across a very large population and say, based on statistics, this is what you should be doing. Or the other hand, this is my personal experience, so you should be doing it the same way as I did.
00:42:28
Speaker
Neeru is going to help. What is going to work is if you have flexibility, being able to dynamically respond to the situation that you encounter. Yeah, I agree with you that you have these two extremes, these two extreme positions. And I mean, it's a very often
00:42:52
Speaker
So I encountered both worlds as well. Yeah. The ones that say, Oh, I did it. I know what I'm doing. Yeah. On the receiving end. Yeah. And the ones that have been, let me just call it preaching for now, have been preaching, but have never done it. And I think both are very dangerous to take as
00:43:14
Speaker
any type of proof, especially the ones that say, I did it, see, and that do not like follow-up questions that go more in depth because they are very allergic against that I noticed. Whereas the other end is just as allergic against it when you ask in-depth questions about practical implementation. And I think whenever you encounter someone like that, on whichever end of the spectrum that we just described is,
00:43:45
Speaker
take a step back and ask yourself, is this the advice that I can actually learn something from? Exactly. Yeah, that is true. And mind you, I'm kind of hesitant and I really don't want to put everybody who tries to teach people about entrepreneurship into the same corner.
00:44:05
Speaker
Obviously, there's a huge number of people who actually respond very well to questions that they cannot answer. Because that happens to all of us, right? You get a student or somebody who wants to learn from you and he or she asks a question and you generally don't know.
00:44:24
Speaker
We're all human, right? So, I mean, what's wrong with just saying, okay? I don't know. I don't know. Let's see if we can find out. Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Exactly. Or, you know, this is my best guess. I may very well be wrong, but this is what I intuitively feel and, you know, do whatever you want.
00:44:43
Speaker
I think that's the only reasonable response in a case like that. I think so too. But do you then, do you think the difference, so we have now defined two extremes of the spectrum of course. I would say just from what I have experienced when it comes to different educational entities, I would say the university is
00:45:09
Speaker
The danger of experiencing one of these two spectrums at the university, I would say, is the insanely theoretical spectrum. Exactly, yeah. But there are also other types of schools, right? We have the University of Applied Sciences, Human Arts and Design schools, which all are now trying to teach entrepreneurship. Do you think at these different, let's say, applied sciences, arts and designs,
00:45:37
Speaker
Do you think the location of where we are on the spectrum is different for the different educational entities? I think so. I think so. I think it probably correlates to some extent. And of course, it depends on the specific individuals you encounter. But if I look at the people around me, then I see that lots of people with... So talking, for example, about the universities of appliance sizes, right?
00:46:03
Speaker
I see people working there with very often practical business experience, entrepreneurial experience, and also at least some and sometimes a very decent theoretical background, but not maybe with the same conceptual clarity that you see at a university, but they can translate more abstract models into actual practical recommendations or advice.
00:46:28
Speaker
And you know working with these people and of course that is also the reason why we work together because we're complementary. One of the things that I try to bring of course is this conceptual clarity and consistency and challenge them on that part and of course they challenge me on the more practical part where I mean where I kind of fit in one
00:46:49
Speaker
part of the spectrum, namely the quasi-entrepreneur who has done the IT thing for a few years. And based on that, things he knows what running a business is. But it's just that business. But I do think that you see different, yeah, so that the institutions where you can learn something about entrepreneurship kind of plot on this continuum. And hopefully, there are also institutions where that kind of
00:47:17
Speaker
Strike a good mill of ground. And, you know, I think very many do. The applied sciences really come very close. And again, it really depends on who you encounter, because there's people like those at universities as well, and you find them actually in the entrepreneurial world as well.
00:47:37
Speaker
So it really comes down to finding the right individuals, I think. But given, you know, if you're looking for optimizing the chance of finding the right people, then maybe the University of Applied Sciences are a very good spot to look in. Yeah.
00:47:51
Speaker
And generally, they have their networks connecting with universities as well. So if there's more theoretical background needed, then obviously, it's fairly easy to make that connection as well. Right. Because that's something that I have seen universities struggle with, having industry connections, at least
00:48:15
Speaker
Well, I mean, I can be quite frank, at least I'm coming from a university background. Whatever I have seen as industry connections are nothing else but superficial connections that are sold as I know somebody at Microsoft.
00:48:33
Speaker
Your friend works at Microsoft and that's fair. That's fine. But do not sell that as an actual business connection for your students to come sign up with you. And this is what I have seen happening a lot. Really? Yes. And I have been also blindsided by myself because I thought, oh, wow, this could be
00:48:57
Speaker
First I liked the person and then I thought, wow, they're willing to help me with these great connections that they have, which turned out to be.
00:49:07
Speaker
Nothing, non-existent basically, which made me quite a bit sad, but also made me question, who else does that? And then when I looked around, I started to see it's common practice to do this at the university, which makes me even, which makes me quite mad and angry for all the students who believe the professor and then, well, basically count on the professor.
00:49:35
Speaker
and have just been dated actually. I don't know, I find this just terrible practice.
00:49:43
Speaker
Obviously, I have not very much experienced this as a student, although to some extent, of course, I studied information management and I noticed that there was a partial overlap between the faculty and the business world. So it was pretty common there to encounter people who, for example, were teaching two days a week and being a consultant three days a week.
00:50:08
Speaker
So there was a pretty good connection. We also had some professors that were really tightly networked with companies where they had working relationships existing many, many years. In fact, if I look at my PhD period in the introduction, I talked about it very, very briefly, but one of these kind or older gentlemen that I encountered, it turned out to be my promoter in the end,
00:50:35
Speaker
He is a now emeritus professor in management science.
00:50:43
Speaker
But he has the most amazing network in the business community, ranging from companies in the Netherlands in sustainable energy technology to Volkswagen to Toyota. Really, it's a different story, but he's really very well networked, and these people know him, he knows them. The problem is, he's kind of a last of the Americans.
00:51:09
Speaker
Ah, that's sad. And you see that in academia, of course, like we all know, the emphasis is very much on publication, publisher-perish. It's a reality that we all know, and it's very difficult to escape from. But I think at a deeper level is that there is a selection mechanism to select those people within academia that perform well on academic tasks, but not necessarily on business acumen.
00:51:40
Speaker
It's just a different character. If I look around me in ASML or whatever, a technology company,
Integrating Real World Experiences in Education
00:51:48
Speaker
particularly at, for example, a purchasing department. I've seen quite a few purchasing departments of these high-tech companies. Obviously, it's a completely different profile that I encountered there than if I look around me at my academic colleagues.
00:52:01
Speaker
And they're both sets of fine people with amazing competences, very valuable, but I could not transplant either of them in the other place.
00:52:12
Speaker
And it really works both ways. Even if they have an academic degree, I cannot put a purchasing manager and the management faculty and expect it's going to work. Because both sides of the deal are going to go mad within two weeks. And they know it. And it's the other way as well.
00:52:32
Speaker
my academic colleagues, I would not curse them by trying to transplant them into the business world. Nobody's going to be happier for it. And I think that makes it difficult to bridge the gap because that's really a different language.
00:52:48
Speaker
But the gap is just going to get wider. The more we try to say, okay, you stay in your shoes, I stay in mine. The gap is getting wider. It's getting wider. And I started to notice that on both sides exactly.
00:53:03
Speaker
And not to the intention of either side, at least. That's how it seems to me. So it must be some symptom coming from this, how the system is operating at the current moment. If you ask me, but I'm not saying this as a social scientist, but just as a lay person looking at what happens around him. And I would say it's competition. We are competing, each other just
00:53:29
Speaker
until it bleeds. And we do this in the business world and we do this in academia as well. So it's really a matter of scarce resources. And it means that we have managed the Slack resources out of both these sets of organizations very systematically. There are very little Slack resources in academia. So there's just very little time for the average university
00:53:53
Speaker
teacher, assistant professor to actually go out and visit his contacts at Microsoft or whatever. You just don't have the time for it. If you have 15 thesis students and they're doing 50 researches at 15 different companies and you have maybe 30 hours per thesis to read it, to second read another thesis, I mean it's a lot of
00:54:15
Speaker
It's a lot of time that goes into just supervising the student. Ideally, you would like to actually meet up two or three times with the organization as well to discuss how is it going? What is actually your knowledge need? What kind of future projects could we do? The thing is always that if you're at a thesis defense, I mean, thesis are a good example because that's where we really see interaction between the business world and universities.
00:54:44
Speaker
If you're at a thesis defense and the internal supervisor from the company is also present and you sit together discussing the grade and how did the student do, and always I ask the question because usually it's a fun project and you have a good contact and a good rapport. Shall we do another one if the opportunity rises? They always say, yeah, that would be nice, call me.
00:55:12
Speaker
But in 90% of the cases, people are not being called.
00:55:18
Speaker
Because it's very difficult to bring these things together. You get students assigned to you and you never know if they actually have the interests that fit with. And we do try, but you don't have the time, for example, between courses or between thesis trajectories to maintain these contacts. And that is what you should be doing. I mean, if you're working in academia, and I'm really talking about management science because that's closest to home for me.
00:55:47
Speaker
But you should be doing your account management.
00:55:50
Speaker
Yes, you definitely should. That is the whole key. At least maybe half a day a week should be dedicated to actually going out, going to these organizations, meet up with the people that you've known for maybe five, 10 years, discuss how business is going, what kind of challenges they're running into, how the industry is changing, and what kind of topics arise from that that you could actually assign students to.
00:56:19
Speaker
where they can actually add value. Because if you just wait until a student pops up and they have an idea and you just try to parachute them into an organization, there's going to be mild interest on both sides. Do you think by incorporating that type of practice, the content of the entrepreneurship courses would also improve?
00:56:41
Speaker
I think if you're bringing entrepreneurs on board, and these can be entrepreneurs that have been working for a few years as well, that is insanely useful. And we did exactly this thing, because as you recall, you were part of the first edition of the startup accelerator, right?
00:57:00
Speaker
And as you recall, there were two trainers and one was me and the other one was Bart, and Bart was, of course, also an entrepreneur. And he then became director of an education that, well, you kind of drift it off and he's going to be an entrepreneur again in the future, I predict. But what we also did was for the second edition, we invited you along with some other entrepreneurs to become the dragons
00:57:29
Speaker
where the new people would have to defend their business plans and their ideas. And we did that in order to really make a connection between existing but still fairly young entrepreneurs and the really up and coming or starting out entrepreneurs. So there's one example of you have to bridge these worlds by actually bringing the people together. So yeah, I think that helps.
00:57:56
Speaker
No, that was definitely, it was also a fun experience for me once being on the other side of the table. I'm now not the one doing the pitching. I'm the one who people are pitching to. This was definitely just also from a practical perspective.
00:58:16
Speaker
very interesting to see because you often, when you make a product, it always says, oh, try not to think about how you would use it. Try to think about how your customer would use it. So just as when you pitch, it always says, don't pitch for somebody who knows all this stuff. Try to think about
00:58:34
Speaker
the one who you're pitching to, what do you want to get out, what's their background, that's how you need to package it. So when I was sitting on this other end, this was a very nice, well, just experiment for myself and the experience was quite fun, I have to say.
00:58:53
Speaker
And it's at least as difficult sitting in that side of the table as opposed to pitching your plan. And I mean, for the ones that don't know exactly what it was about, so it was modeled after the show Dragon's Den, for the ones that are not familiar with it, it's basically Shark Tank. It's the same kind of concept. You get people in and you have the, in that case, what was it? I think we were four or five.
00:59:20
Speaker
potential investors who then make an offer on the pitch of the people doing the accelerator. And that pitch came at the end of the accelerator, so they had ample time to work things out.
00:59:37
Speaker
We have been working with these people for, I don't know, three months or so during a few sessions, honing their business ideas and then they had to pitch it. And then we had this game where you as quote unquote investors could press a button like I'm going to invest or not. Hostile takeover was also one. Hostile takeover was also one. I like this so much.
01:00:01
Speaker
take it off the market because I won it. That was pretty cool. So there was the whole concept of putting a little pressure on it as well. But definitely also triggering feedback from actual entrepreneurs, because along with you, there was also this woman who was putting all these soda panels on the roofs of primary schools. Hilde, right? From STEM or Prabekt.
01:00:28
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Great company, great entrepreneur. Great company, great person has been doing that for about 10 years or so and her business is really taking off lately. So really people who actually have stood in their same shoes as the people pitching their plans.
01:00:48
Speaker
in a sort of quasi-non-threatening environment as well, because there was no actual hostile takeover and nobody got burned. But it was exciting. But yeah, it was definitely a cool experience.
01:01:03
Speaker
But going back to your question of how do you bridge the gap between academia and the business, because I think it's still a crucial thing. And it takes on the academic side that you have the time and the slack resources to actually be able to bring people on board from the real world, from the business world.
01:01:25
Speaker
And on the other side, you also need people, and that is actually more difficult. You need people in organizations who are sufficiently open towards the academic world. Right. I have not found many of those. No, there are few and far between. And I think, you know, you can always, and that's what we currently do, you can put the responsibility with the academics and say, well, you should be translating your insights sufficiently towards a practitioner perspective.
01:01:54
Speaker
And sure, you have to dumb your ideas down in such a way that everybody understands them. And I'm all for that, but dumbing down, I'm using that very deliberately, that term, also means you lose some of the essence. On the other side, you need absorptive capacity in organizations in order to deal with more complex concepts. And that means that you have
01:02:15
Speaker
You have to have, particularly in larger organizations, some quasi-academics. And I do see them in governments, particularly in larger governments, regional provinces and ministries. There's no problem there. It's very easy to interface between academia and the larger governments. It's a seamless communication. We speak each other's language, basically.
01:02:39
Speaker
At least almost. We have our own sort of vocabulary, but we can interface fairly easily. But if you look at the business world, it's much more difficult. And there's also a lot of mistrust within business people, managers, throughout the layers of organizations like, oh,
01:03:03
Speaker
It's academia, it's all theory, it's all, you know, a difficult, complex, slow, a low added value, cannot be implemented, is not useful. These are the kinds of emotions that you kind of run into. But it's more like, I started to notice to me, it feels this type of a response often feels like a
01:03:25
Speaker
like a protective self-preservation mechanism almost. I think it's partly to do with fear. Because it's, I don't know, it comes out so like almost like a reflex by now. It's almost emotional as well in some cases. Strange.
01:03:40
Speaker
I think it's what people do when we get confronted with something that we cannot fully understand, that we kind of sort of fancy it off and try to sort of antagonize it. And in part, I think it's also just, it's also right.
01:04:01
Speaker
Because all these things, to an extent, are also true. And if you work, for example, I do a lot of thesis supervision, so that's why I come back to that. And also, as we recorded, it's thesis season, so it's front of my mind.
01:04:20
Speaker
If you have an organization that has never worked with a thesis student before, particularly an academic thesis student, so university, then they sometimes sort of expect that the student comes in, does their thing and solves a problem.
01:04:37
Speaker
And that doesn't happen. That's not what I was about to say. That's not what's happening. That's not the way it works. A student like that, I think the added value is they come and bring some knowledge, of course, based on a lot in literature research, and they can do some empirical research as well, and they can link that. But most importantly, they can ask questions that should make you as a practitioner think.
01:05:02
Speaker
And I think that is the main thing that we need in organizations. Or rethink. Or view critically. So if you encounter a student that wants to do an interview with you, and I'm speaking to the business people right now, the first thing is please say yes. It only costs you an hour of your time and it really adds value if you do something useful with it.
01:05:25
Speaker
And the second thing is, don't focus too much on your answers, because you know those, I trust that. But focus on the questions that are asked and ask yourself, why does this person ask me these questions? Because that is the interesting thing. There's something behind there. And of course, towards the end of the conversation, you can also ask that towards your student, like, okay, you've asked these questions, and some of them made sense to me and some didn't. But please tell me a little bit more about the background and why these questions were relevant in the first place.
01:05:56
Speaker
Because that's what you're going to take out of it. It's going to make you reflect on your own work through the perspective of somebody who looks at it in a conceptual way. And that's, you know, as an outsider, right? That's also as an outsider, but also from a very conceptual viewpoint. And in my experience, that helps you to spot fundamental structural problems in your in your way of doing business is really looking at the conceptual perspective of things.
01:06:26
Speaker
Right. No, I agree. I agree. That's interesting. I have not looked at that before. Yeah. So we kind of took a turn here. No, that's all right. That's totally all right. It's still about, well, the experience of teaching entrepreneurship, right? It is still about that. But OK, now let me try to combine what we talked about before when it came to like the Dragon's Den or Shark Tank.
01:06:56
Speaker
Something that I was very, I mean, okay, you know, I have academic training, now I'm doing entrepreneurship stuff, but one thing I was always doing was I wanted to do my homework, not to do everything perfect, but at least to be prepared to be able to deal with a situation when it's in front of me, or at least when I know a situation is in front of me and I don't know how to deal with it, that at least know
01:07:25
Speaker
What can I do to still get the most out of this situation or do I need to take a step back? What I thought was very strange with any entrepreneurship course that I participated in or was part of giving
01:07:42
Speaker
was the lack of any type of specific entrepreneurship books mentioned to the students to continue reading. Okay. So what I mean by this is, so I have, uh, for example, you have the lean startup, Eric Reese, um, great book. It's
01:08:05
Speaker
Take something conceptual, immediately puts it into practice and helps you to do that exactly on your own case. You have principles. Oh, God, I was a Ray Dalio. I'm not 100% sure. Principles, you also have the effective executive. These books are treated in the, let me say, just realm of entrepreneurship as like Bibles.
01:08:31
Speaker
Yeah. You need to read these. Yeah, exactly. But never ever have I heard anyone in any of these, when I was suggesting these, and I had students who were already far along their trajectory of becoming managers or
01:08:48
Speaker
participating in entrepreneurship courses, they have never ever heard of any of these books. And I personally just couldn't believe it, because these books are worth their weight in gold, basically. Because you learn not only from an entrepreneurship perspective, but also from the entrepreneurship or life tools perspective. Or other things where we did then this role play of Dragon's Den,
01:09:17
Speaker
But what I have also never heard of teachers suggesting, you know what? Watch Shark Tank. Don't just watch it. Analyze it. Take the good deals. Take the ones that actually got a deal.
01:09:35
Speaker
Look at the ones that didn't get a deal. And now you have two camps, you have two sites of data, analyze what happened. What happened? Was it the idea? Was it the communication? Was it the...
01:09:51
Speaker
the valuation idea the entrepreneur had, was it then the percentage they were willing or not willing to give up? Did they negotiate what happened? Nothing. I have never ever heard this advice given by any teacher ever. It's odd, isn't it? And I find this so strange. And I'm wondering,
01:10:16
Speaker
Can you find some explanation of why do you think that is? Well, there's basically two things. So you mentioned books, many of the books that we indeed know about, that have become very popular. And on the other hand, you mentioned basically case studies in the form of very accessible media, like Shark Tank and what comes to mind also is The Apprentice. Oh, yeah, okay. That was gold as well. That was gold as well.
01:10:45
Speaker
So, why is that not used as much as it could? Well, firstly, I don't know how many people actually use these books in their teaching and I have the impression that, for example, the Lean Starter by Rhys actually does play a fairly significant role in teaching and also research.
01:11:02
Speaker
I have a couple of students who are researching to entrepreneurship at this moment, and one of the main things that they rely on is the concept of the lean startup. As a sort of counterbalance against the classic idea of write your expensive business plan, your own business Bible, and this is the way you're going to do it, being more flexible.
01:11:28
Speaker
So the first thing is, I'm not really sure if these books are really not used as much as they should, but the second thing is, you know, why would they not be used as much? And if I look at the academic perspective, then I notice that there is very often a distrust against these kind of more practice-oriented books.
01:11:45
Speaker
And I can sort of see the sense in that because if you talk about conceptual clarity and conceptual and also empirical evidence that this is not the strongest point of these books, they always run a little bit the risk of falling into, you know, we spoke of this dimension of falling into this category of I've done it once so I know how it works.
01:12:10
Speaker
Very often, these management books, they're very inspiring, but they're also written from the perspective of one particular person who has not necessarily done or tried to do a job of critically falsifying all the things that they try to say. They have a fairly coherent story to tell, and it's an inspiring story. And it's a story that many people recognize parts of, and they see the sense of it. So it has a lot of face validity.
01:12:40
Speaker
But it's not necessarily always a conceptually bulletproof story. And I think for academics, that makes it a little bit difficult to sort of recommend this kind of stuff because they say, well, it's one-sided and it's not necessarily sufficiently validated. And then, of course, we run into a problem with academia because by the time things like the lean startup have become validated,
01:13:05
Speaker
I've been out for a while. Exactly. And we're currently working with it, you know, trying to trying to figure out how it works from an academic perspective. So that means by the time that these these books go out of fashion, by that time academia is catching up.
01:13:24
Speaker
So we're lagging behind. I think that is not the problem. And we talked about these universities of applied sciences and there I see people are a little bit more likely to recommend this kind of reading. Then if I look at the other example that you gave of the cases in the form of shows and competitions that you mentioned. Because just to quickly interject, my counter argument would be
01:13:51
Speaker
The lots of academic literature I read when it comes to management science, because of course, before I wanted to teach a course, I wanted to be proficient. I can't stand teachers who are obviously not prepared. They should be standing there in the first place. But I also read plenty of those. And what I saw were also lots and lots of case studies.
01:14:20
Speaker
I'm more of a quantitative background, like empirical, get your data, analyze it, stats left and right. So when I read the case study after case study, and then I read it therefore, my alarm bells rang big time.
01:14:39
Speaker
Because I don't know which case studies were deemed case study good enough for this thread of story. And that is what I mean. So that's why I was also like, wait a minute. I'm not saying anything against qualitative research.
01:14:59
Speaker
No, you shouldn't because that's pretty much it. No, I'm not. I think it has its place and just as with qualitative, it has pros and cons. Obviously. But this was a critique point my colleagues never really liked to hear, but they had no true counter argument to it either.
01:15:18
Speaker
No, and I think because there are no counter-arguments. I mean, if you're critical of case study research, then obviously this is largely correct. And again, I'm also not saying that case study research doesn't work or that qualitative research doesn't work. I should know better. But it's not bulletproof. So if you have questions on, in this case, case selection,
01:15:44
Speaker
Then, of course, you can look at the case selection criteria that people applied and how transparent are they about the identity of the cases, which is very often anonymized for very understandable reasons. You can look at basically their methods and see, is this an approach that conceivably would result in sort of dependable outcomes?
01:16:09
Speaker
But I think you also have to keep in mind that case study research and qualitative research in general, I mean, the outcomes, you interpret them differently from quantitative research. I mean, with quantitative research, obviously, we can say, yes, this is true or no, this is not true. There is a relation or there isn't. And we can say there was a statistic significance. And of course, in case study research and qualitative research, it's much more about finding mechanisms, how things
01:16:36
Speaker
could progress and how they actually progressed in a specific instance, and then trying to understand why this is the case. And then from that, try to generalize towards a more theoretical level and then try to recognize, so is there a more general principle at work here? And how could we test that general principle? And of course, the shortcoming of much of the research, particularly in business science,
01:17:01
Speaker
is that we see the theory generation, but we don't see all that much of theory testing on all the theories generated. So a lot of case study research ends with, well, it could be this or that way. We should really test this rigorously one day and it doesn't happen.
Research Methods and Practical Applications
01:17:19
Speaker
And of course, based on that finding, you could say it's kind of all, you have to look at it critically. Right. Yeah. And I think that should be the take-home message that if it's any of these books that you read, or if it's also the academic literature, you should always read this critically.
01:17:38
Speaker
There's no, this resource is better than that resource. Well, it depends what it is, but the amount of critique or let's say the depth of critique is a different one. But you should always, always take it with a grain of salt.
01:17:56
Speaker
You should take it with a grain of salt. Looking at it positively, take it as a source of inspiration. Particularly with qualitative research, see it as a collection of ideas that may or may not work.
01:18:13
Speaker
But that do make sense to some extent because they have been published in these peer-reviewed journals and this peer-reviewed process, as you know very well, it's a very critical process. I mean, people really look very thoroughly at these results and they do question everything. So the ideas themselves do make sense. What you don't know is if these ideas stand true in 100% of the cases. And I would say most likely not. But
01:18:39
Speaker
If, for example, you're running a business and you have a collection of articles on entrepreneurship, then probably the ideas in all those articles do make sense in one way or another for your business as well. But you'll have to transpose and translate them to your own business. And that, of course, is something that
01:18:58
Speaker
Maybe people don't expect that they have to put in that effort. I'm not really sure. Maybe academics do a very poor job in effectively communicating the outcomes. But I do feel that there's a lot to be learned from just looking at that literature. Although it's a very tedious job. That is true.
01:19:15
Speaker
And that is my main criticism against the academic literature. I mean, we have a very high emphasis in the academic world on publishing these kinds of things. But in my view, it's a super inefficient way of communicating the outcomes of academic research. And my personal opinion is also it is fundamentally a wrong way.
01:19:36
Speaker
Because we spend a lot of time on going through this peer review process with all the best intentions, it also means that there is a lag between the conception of research and actually publishing results of usually two to five years if it's not even more. At least two years between identifying a research question and publishing results if you manage that within two years is very fast.
01:20:00
Speaker
So there's always a significant time lag. Then it's going to be published in some journal that at least people in practice really don't read. It's only academics that scroll through them quickly to see which articles they need for their own reference list.
01:20:15
Speaker
So these articles aren't really getting read all that much because you don't have the time to read all this stuff. If you're setting up your own research, you'll have to sort of, you know. And you cannot just like casually read a paper. Not really. You have to filter very quickly based on titles and abstracts and conclusion sections. Sometimes you zoom in a little further.
01:20:37
Speaker
So they're not written for the audience where the impact could be the biggest, which is the real world.
01:20:47
Speaker
So there's a huge disconnect, and we've talked very briefly about valorization, making practical use of academically created knowledge. The academic literature is completely inappropriate to do this. It's the wrong tool. And that is one of my main frustrations, that we spend so much time in academia trying to push out these publications.
01:21:13
Speaker
that are going to be referenced by other researchers for X number of times, and that are in the most cases not being read at all by practitioners. And all time we spend on that, we do not spend on interacting with the business world, where we could actually have an impact. Right. Well, that's crucial. But okay, coming, segueing back to the business world,
Crucial Entrepreneurial Skills and Mindset
01:21:40
Speaker
and the teaching part, which aspects, now you, so you work with entrepreneurs, you work with business people, you've been an entrepreneur yourself, which skills do you think are crucial to have as an entrepreneur? So let's just say for a person that wants to start a business, are crucial, but do you think are not being actually taught in these courses?
01:22:07
Speaker
It's a difficult one to just do that off the top of my head. But one of the projects that I've done that reminds me a couple of years ago was making an assessment of where in one of the provinces in the Netherlands where the manufacturing industry is going. And this was something that the province wanted to know because they wanted to make good industry policy. Very noble.
01:22:35
Speaker
We went to talk with two colleagues of Inertep. We went to talk with all these entrepreneurs that we could find with a list of maybe 30, 40 manufacturing firms that we selected from the province and sat down with these people, large firms, very many small, medium enterprises.
01:22:55
Speaker
And one thing struck me was that if I sorted the successful ones from the ones that I thought, well, I'm not really sure if there is a future for you, there was two characteristics.
01:23:09
Speaker
And again, this is not validated research, but something that just kind of struck me. The first aspect that the successful entrepreneurs had was that they had a very active opinion and they talked a lot about how they saw the world and how they viewed the future.
01:23:28
Speaker
They really had a vision for how the world is changing and what their place is in that. Very often they had some sense of idealism to go along with their business sense because they were also competent managers. But they had a view of the world around them and not just their customer base or their supplier network, but just the world in general.
01:23:54
Speaker
And they had these very, very inspired stories about that. And the second thing that they had, the successful ones was, how do you put it in English? I mean, they had, they were not limited or bothered by too much criticism, self-criticism, critical thought. They did not hinder themselves.
01:24:24
Speaker
Okay, that's super crucial. It's super crucial. You have to have some degree of tunnel vision. I think that captures it quite well, tunnel vision. They had a tunnel vision and that tunnel vision consisted of, I have this vision of the future and the world around me. I have this vision of my role in that and my business's role in that, which obviously is a successful business and they were not bothered by
01:24:52
Speaker
seeing anything that could possibly go wrong. Maybe the major things like, okay, we need to do this development properly, and okay, there's a competitor, but they were not bogged down by all kinds of reasoning like, hey, maybe my vision is not conceptually clear enough.
01:25:08
Speaker
Interestingly, I'm contradicting myself here, right? Because if you recall, I talked earlier about conceptual clarity and looking at your business from a conceptual viewpoint. But you can do that too much. You can be bogged down by that. It can lead you to inaction. Exactly. Because you just keep yourself busy with the theory and you think, ah, it's all going to be fine. But you actually never do anything.
01:25:32
Speaker
Exactly. Then you also don't get anywhere. You can identify all the failure modes. Obviously, no plan is bulletproof. Of course not. That's what you kind of find out. That's something that really struck me that these people are fundamentally optimistic.
01:25:51
Speaker
But then just to maybe I would then reframe it. Maybe I would say the first point that you mean that the vision, the idealism and the talking about it is super strong communication aspect of
01:26:08
Speaker
not pushing your ideas on everybody, but trying to see, maybe trying to probe how these other people that you talk to see the world that you are envisioning, or maybe try to get more data in about your actual worldview by trying to communicate it with your vision. And the second part, not bothered by criticism. I don't know.
01:26:33
Speaker
Tunnel vision I often see as something like, this is where I go no matter what happens. But it sounded more like a dedicated filter which allows for, oh, somebody said something smart that I need to take into consideration for my worldview that I should incorporate. Oh, somebody else said something that completely makes no sense, ignore.
01:27:00
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. In one of the workshops I was teaching quite recently, I collected a number of very short song bites or videos of successful entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. Actually, Elon Musk was not in there.
01:27:19
Speaker
Just coincidence, but the people who started LinkedIn and all these fairly well-known businesses. One of the soundbites was actually of a guy, I think it was the founder of LinkedIn, but I could be wrong. No, it was not the founder of LinkedIn. It doesn't matter. He said, the important thing in succeeding as an entrepreneur is having the conviction
01:27:46
Speaker
and making no amount of data can sway that conviction.
01:27:54
Speaker
And that is the interesting balance because on the one hand, you need to be sensitive to criticism for people who actually have a point, so that filter that you have. And on the other hand, you have to have your conviction and hold on to it. And that is the tunnel vision that I propagated. That's a tough balance to keep. And that is a tough balance. So I think that is, so if there's one thing that is not being taught in entrepreneurship courses, and really should be, is how to balance this thing.
01:28:24
Speaker
Because this is the essential thing. We can teach everything about what to include in a business plan and what are the things to think about when you do your launch strategy and all these things. It's fairly straightforward. It's a lot to take in. But it's, I mean, in a manner of speaking, you could almost get these things from Wikipedia and do it at your home. But what you really need to train
01:28:52
Speaker
and practice at and learn and conceptually grasp is how to filter the sense from the nonsense and how to include the critical views that make sense into your business planning and to keep the nonsense at bay, even though the people who are talking to the nonsense may be crucial stakeholders, mind you. Right, right. So maybe it's also that
01:29:16
Speaker
doing that and being nice while doing it. And maybe also learning the tools to be able to distinguish was this now nonsense or not. Just like probing, little probing, that's often all it takes. And after the first answer, you know. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's just a little probing. I think it does take a
01:29:36
Speaker
But it's often not taught, I have I admit, it's often not what students walk out of the university, or some of these courses where they have not, I mean, it's a crucial part of critical thinking, I would say, that doesn't only go as in
01:29:52
Speaker
I heard a story. I'm criticizing it. End of story. It's like, no, this is my story. I hear a criticism. I take that in. I flip it around and I ask a follow up question. And this follow up thing in a life scenario, in a normal conversation, I have
01:30:13
Speaker
rarely seen happening. I would agree. It's rare. Particularly with a very productive outcome. You don't have to go all the way down the rabbit hole. You should know that after asking the first question like, okay, this is a stakeholder, it is important, criticism, ignore.
01:30:37
Speaker
This is maybe not even an important stakeholder, criticism valid. Let's see how deep we can go so I can walk out of this conversation with the most amount of, I don't like to use buzzwords, but actionable insight to then make sure that my vision will stay on track.
01:30:58
Speaker
even though that criticism was valid, or especially because it was valid, maybe even that. Yeah. No, I think that is a crucial thing. Do the drill down to a sufficient extent if you encounter something that is worthwhile drilling down on it.
01:31:14
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. It's also your time. Exactly. And you need to be nice about it. You have to be nice at that as well. So it is a lot of things that need to come together. And I think that we all have the experience that once in a while you meet somebody with whom you can do that, that actually has a message to tell and who's willing and able to actually do the drill down with you.
01:31:35
Speaker
And most of the people that you encounter, it's either not the right moment or it's not, they don't have the relevant knowledge or attitude or whatever. And this is okay because this is another thing that I think should be taught, and maybe it is taught but not enough by me then in any case, is how to balance between stability and dynamics.
Adaptability and Flexibility in Business
01:31:58
Speaker
So my firm belief is that
01:32:01
Speaker
You increase your chance of starting a business or being an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur in whatever capacity is if you have a consistent and clear worldview and a very consistent and clear idea of how you're going to change the world, basically, even in a minor way.
01:32:19
Speaker
The problem with having a clear and consistent worldview is that it takes some time to build it and you have to change it sometimes. Because you learn things and it turns out you have been wrong all the time and you have to change some fundamental aspect of it. But the problem is if you build a business on that, then
01:32:38
Speaker
You don't want to build it on quicksand. Yeah, of course, you can't. So you have to strike the balance between having a worldview that is sufficiently stable and also a vision that translates into your business. That's sufficiently stable to remain dependable, to make decisions upon, strategic decisions. And on the other hand, allowing for the flexibility to change your worldview where you realize, no, I've been wrong at a fundamental level and I need to change this.
01:33:06
Speaker
And I think that is also maybe it's periods. So as an academic, I would think about things like the punctuated equilibrium, which is a concept that basically says you have periods of stability alternated by periods of change. And maybe it's something like that. So that is that it's plotted out in time that you have periods where your worldview is very stable and you can base decisions on them. And then you have to allow for periods of dynamics or of change.
01:33:35
Speaker
where you can actually change that world view so that it can become stable again in the future.
01:33:41
Speaker
And I think managing that process and not letting it happen to you, I think that is also a crucial aspect of being an entrepreneur. And now it's really a difference between being an entrepreneur as a person and the life cycle of the business, because I can very well imagine that as an entrepreneur, as a person, your worldview and your ambitions change.
01:34:07
Speaker
But the business, they always do. You grow older and, you know, we get more gray hairs. I get less hair. And of course, your business also should change a bit, but I mean, you are not your business.
01:34:24
Speaker
So maybe it's very permissible that as your worldview changes, your relationship with your business also changes. Maybe you depart from it. Maybe you change the business altogether. Maybe you end it. Keep in mind the introduction that I gave and the company that I had. I mean, that was a very good example. The world changed. My worldview changed. My ambitions changed. I knew this was happening. So it was sort of intuitive. It could have ended very badly, but I locked out.
01:34:55
Speaker
And I said, okay, it's done. It's a period that comes to an end. And I've literally had people ask me later on, I was doing job interviews by then, I thought I was.
01:35:07
Speaker
I may want to work in consultancy, it was a stupid idea. But I was doing job interviews and they said, why did you end the business? There were thousands of mid-cap companies that could have used your business. And I thought, you do not understand the market I was in. And you do not understand the way I was doing business and my worldview. Because I could not have worked successfully with these mid-cap businesses the way I had worked successfully with the smaller businesses and the schools that I did before.
01:35:37
Speaker
It was just a fundamental misunderstanding. I didn't take the job. And this was a crucial moment in a job interview for me because I thought we do not understand each other. But this is what I mean. This goes you having this insight into it's not only that this person
01:35:58
Speaker
put out some criticism. It's you had the depth to reflect on that criticism, going one step further as in what does that actually tell me about that person? I only understood later. I only understood later at that moment, and I was like in my mid 20s or so. So it's some time ago, and I it was only an intuition. I thought I don't feel I don't feel comfortable with these people.
01:36:21
Speaker
And this question was not even actually, I didn't sense it as criticism, I thought, well, logical question, the guy tells you had a business before, now he's applying for a job here, doesn't compute, explain to me, did you screw up the business, right? Okay, so where's your weak spot? And I interpreted that as that kind of question. And I explained like, no, it's different priority, market has changed, and I had no mission to continue, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
01:36:52
Speaker
But much later I realized that there was, well, quite likely a very fundamental misunderstanding of the way I did business. And probably I didn't explain it clearly enough, right? There's also a part of it. But I think also knowing that person a little bit, he probably was not capable of understanding.
01:37:13
Speaker
Because we were just different, different characters. And yeah, so it was just no match. But there was an interesting message from that as well, apart from no match. But at least, OK, I think what I really like and what came out in the last 15, 20 minutes of our conversation was what these entrepreneurship courses, entrepreneurship courses, classes, workshops, programs, whatever,
01:37:40
Speaker
are definitely missing. So if anyone's listening that's giving this, please try to incorporate this. Everybody wins if you do this. I think so. You as a teacher, because these skills that we just talked about, let it be communication or not being
01:37:58
Speaker
being so sensitive to criticism, these are skills not only necessary for entrepreneurship. This is important for life, I would say. It would make your life so much easier if you're not triggered by every little negative comment you hear.
01:38:17
Speaker
from a person who might meant well. There's also something I'd like to say, always give benefit of the doubt. Not everybody's out there to put you down, but sometimes it can just be miscommunication. Actually, this is the interesting thing, but maybe I've been lucky, but in my experience, there's very, very few people who are actually out to get you down.
01:38:40
Speaker
Yeah, I have also not met any. Well, I have met a few, but... There are a few. There are a few, but they were a minority, a super small minority. If they show their behavior very often, it's not even intentional. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they do nasty things. You think, well, was that necessary? And again, the job interview that I just referred to, it turned nasty at some point, and it was functionally nasty, right? Yes. It was basically systematically trying to trick me to get angry.
01:39:07
Speaker
At some point, the guy said, well, no matter what I say, you don't get angry. He said, no, I don't because it's not worth it. And so it was very functional applied being a jerk. And that's what people do sometimes. And you know, give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it's something they do intentionally because it needs to be done. Maybe it is the only way to get the message across with you because you tend to have a fairly thick skull.
01:39:36
Speaker
It's possible. You know, I do have a mirror. Maybe it's something they cannot help it. You know, maybe it's as simple as they slept bad or they're hungry. It can be as simple as that. It's those things and it's yeah.
01:39:55
Speaker
I mean, I know people that are, you cannot have a fun conversation with them when they are hungry. I used to be that as well, and luckily not anymore, because I worked on that. But it can be these simple things that have nothing to do with you.
01:40:13
Speaker
Exactly. I've had somebody in my family, it's probably going to sound horribly sexist or wrong. It's not meant that way, but I've lived in the same house with somebody, not one of my ex-girlfriends, just to say that. It was fairly dangerous to strike up a discussion when she was in her period. Again, it's not a sexist thing, but it was just
01:40:40
Speaker
external influences, you know, or in this case, very internal, but just has nothing to do with uncontrollable, uncontrollable. I mean, it just dictates how somebody to what extent they are sensitive to communicating in a certain way.
01:40:57
Speaker
And it's sometimes it's as stupid as that. And if you assume like, oh, she's doing that because of malevolent behavior or some kind of, yeah, obviously your relationship is going to suffer from it. But if you think, well, it's, you know, this is not the day to discuss this topic. Yeah.
01:41:14
Speaker
It's all good. We can do this next week. It's fine. And it's the same with everybody. If you talk to a potential investor and you notice that they're not very enthusiastic about your plans, well, maybe it's a good idea to not pursue the topic too much. See if there's a way to reschedule the meeting, find a nice way of getting out of it.
01:41:39
Speaker
and try again later. It may just be a bad day.
01:41:45
Speaker
I have just two more questions for you. If you're still... It's fine. We should finish the job. All right. All right. So, okay, this might sound a little cryptic and can't go in any direction, but do you think the current way entrepreneurship is being taught actually indoctrinates potential future entrepreneurs in a standard way of thinking?
01:42:10
Speaker
I can only speak for myself because this would be really too dangerous to answer in a more universal way. So I can only go by what I've seen, what I've been actively involved in myself.
01:42:27
Speaker
And I would say no. Okay. Oh, that's good. I mean, that's good. Actually, it's an obviously, yes, it is bound to happen in places. But I'm not very, you know, I know.
01:42:42
Speaker
some places where it's probably the case, and where I have some doubts about the flexibility in what is being taught. And by flexibility, I mean is going to be useful and depend
01:42:58
Speaker
regardless of the context that you end up in as an entrepreneur. But looking at myself, this is something I really try to prevent and I hope I kind of succeed. So if I talk about, for example, business plans, I always say, look, having a business plan is very useful. Don't don't get me wrong. But there's three things that you should understand about a business plan. The first thing is it should not be about fairy tales. So it should have a sense of realism.
01:43:27
Speaker
Secondly, it should not be a stack of papers that you cannot climb on top of because nobody's going to read it. So it shouldn't be too long. And thirdly, and this is the most important thing, never ever carve it in stone. Because a business plan is an organic thing is going to change.
01:43:45
Speaker
So I think that sort of expresses it. So is it dogmatic? By definition, it cannot be dogmatic. I think you cannot, and this sounds dogmatic, obviously, cannot teach people the right way towards entrepreneurship.
01:44:02
Speaker
And again, it's a bit repetitive, but I'm going to rely on what I said earlier. If you want to teach people something about entrepreneurship, you'll have to teach them about looking around them, trying to help them to make sense of their environment, structure that information, and translate that into opportunities that they can grasp, translate it into actionable strategies. I mean, here's the buzzword again.
01:44:30
Speaker
I mean, that is what you can teach people to do, but you cannot teach them, or you should, I think, not teach them, okay, your strategy should look this way, or this is the way to do a market launch.
01:44:45
Speaker
No, you'll have to figure that out yourself. Moreover, we're living in a world of change and particularly technological innovation. I could tell you how to do your market launch today and next year is going to be different because we have all these different platforms to choose from and you want to be able to use them in the future as well.
01:45:04
Speaker
And the funny thing is that the structure of the world and how you study the world has not changed much in the past century or so. Exactly. Humans are still humans. Humans are still humans. We still do the same thing. And it's still a complex world. And making sense of the complexity is not very much different to the time that Galileo tried to do that.
01:45:26
Speaker
but we have different technology than this at our disposal. So I would say no, there's not necessarily very much, there's not too much dogma, which is good, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So if, you know, referring to the popular management books, I mean, if you read Reese's Lean Startup, don't take it as gospel. It's okay if you view it as a Bible,
01:45:56
Speaker
But that's not the same as gospel. That's fair point. It's not a manual of this is how you should run your business. No, it's a source of inspiration. Hey, crap, if we have much quicker feedback cycles, if we confront our ideas with a market much earlier, that is a very powerful mechanism. Should you always keep doing that or should you do that in every possible situation?
01:46:23
Speaker
Hell no. I think there's definitely situations where it's much better to do a linear development and do it very good. Do not confront customers with it. Keep it to yourself. Make sure it's right before you launch it. There's doubtlessly, there's a situation where you should do that and do not do the lean startup.
01:46:43
Speaker
So I think it also has to do with understanding what is the context where the information comes from. Whether it is a management book from Rees, whether it is somebody who tells you how to do entrepreneurship, try to understand their worldview.
01:46:58
Speaker
Why are they saying it like that? If you're talking to Elon Musk and he tells you how to do entrepreneurship, keep in mind that he comes from a fairly wealthy family. I mean, just, that's just a very basic, basic fact. And that his, his brother, you think he has a sister as well, that they're all very entrepreneurial. There's something in that family that stimulates them. So if he's going to tell you how to do entrepreneurship, you'll have to keep that in mind because that's his frame of reference. And it's the same for, for, for reading Reese or whatever.
01:47:29
Speaker
Oh, wow. I'm glad to hear that there is no, at least across the board indoctrination happening. So that's always good. And just to combine it with what you said, your business plan shouldn't be set in stone, just in combination with a lean startup. I just heard that. I also don't remember where I heard this.
01:47:50
Speaker
but it was a no business plan survives first customer interaction. That's a very good quote. Unfortunately, I forgot who said that, but this is not true. If you know that, you know not to invest too much in writing that first version because it's going to go to hell anyway. And the funny thing is that I have
01:48:11
Speaker
For this year's round of thesis, I actually made one of the topics for my bachelor's students, which was a business plan, yay or nay? Should you write one? And I think one of the students actually contacted you to interview you, so that that's where the questions came from. And I really gave them, so I gave them on the one hand, Rhys, and on the one, on the other hand, the classic entrepreneurship literature, which says like, okay, make the business plan, and these are the elements.
01:48:37
Speaker
And basically said, OK, so now what? One side says you should not have a business plan and try to make it up as you go along in a sort of structured way. And the other side says, no, no, plan ahead and make a business plan and then go get financing. So which is which? You tell me. And they go out in the world and investigate that.
01:48:56
Speaker
between you and me and the rest of the world now. I think probably the more flexible dynamic way is bound to be more successful. But I can see the sense of having a business plan as an artifact that you can communicate towards stakeholders. And sometimes you need, I mean, if you go to the bank for financing, then obviously you will need some kind of business plan. They won't just give you any money.
01:49:25
Speaker
No, unfortunately, they should be listening to the story and looking at the people in front of them. In that sense, the world has become not necessarily a better place.
Future of Entrepreneurship Education
01:49:39
Speaker
But maybe this is then also a good recommendation for the people sitting on the other side of the table, the ones that have the finances.
01:49:47
Speaker
let's just say financial institutions, because I think, at least I hope investors, they do inspect not only the business plan, but the person. They do look at the people. But often the financial institutions, which are also crucial instruments in entrepreneurship, often don't do that. Because maybe it is also not trying to place blame me on anyone.
01:50:13
Speaker
I could just imagine that is in the nature of their business in the first place. And that is why that might be happening. Yeah, I think it's very, very difficult from the perspective of the financer because you have to balance risk between risk and opportunity. And I think there's something, you know, looking at, for example, the role of banks, you know, 60 years ago, if you were starting an enterprise, you would go to the bank for credit.
01:50:38
Speaker
Based on your story and your credibility as a person, you would either get it or not, you know, simplified. I mean, it was not if you came to ask for 20 million, but if you came to ask for 20K, that was probably what happened. You went to the branch manager.
01:50:55
Speaker
sat down and talked. And the thing is that I think we've, as a society, we've become risk averse. This is something that has definitely happened to banks. Apparently, it has not helped enough. Look at the credit crunch of 10 years ago, so it was not even effective.
01:51:13
Speaker
And I think it was all for in the wrong way. I mean, if you look at an entrepreneur and try to estimate what is the risk of investing in this entrepreneur, you want to know if the story makes sense. And if the person capable of making the story work.
01:51:29
Speaker
And it's not about how many pages that the business plan have and is the financial statement, does it look well prepared in relation to the accountancy standards that we have. I didn't give a damn.
01:51:46
Speaker
I want to understand, is the fundamental mechanism of the business that he proposes, does that make sense within the context of the world that he sees? And do I understand that world vision? And does it align with what I know about it in terms of facts, facts and figures? And if that is the case, then it's probably worthwhile investing in it.
01:52:07
Speaker
So I think it's, you know, take how to bureaucracy of that. That is one of the things that still is holding back, I think, the flourishing of entrepreneurship and particularly in Europe.
01:52:23
Speaker
We have to take risks, and that is true for the entrepreneurs, but there's a sufficient number of people who are willing to take some risks. And I think particularly at the low end of entrepreneurship, and I call it low end because these are the people who start new web shops and I don't know what, it probably could help if capital was a little bit more mobile. Yeah, I think so too. Well, Rafael, on that note, I think it's
01:52:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think we've come to an end of our conversation. On that bombshell. On that bombshell. No, I think it's good because that's I think the high note that people can take home with and then work on. Hopefully they will. But at least now they know of how to think about a world around them a bit better.
01:53:12
Speaker
That's it. I think that's it. If you can incorporate that into any type of courses or interactions between institutions, it's all for the better. Absolutely. I think we should all try to change the world to some extent.
01:53:28
Speaker
in some capacity and I try to do it by changing and talking to people and actually talking to you right now. My students are doing it by helping companies to figure out certain problems and I think entrepreneurs can do it by
01:53:44
Speaker
bringing the products and services that they think are useful, because they're usually right. That is the one thing that I've learned in working with entrepreneurs, is that I can tell them all kinds of things about how I think it should be done. But they know best. And I can only ask questions.
01:54:02
Speaker
Or at least they're willing to find out. Yeah, exactly. Because it's in their interest. So instead of telling them how it should be done, I think I'm going to change my teaching into only asking questions. So thanks for that. No way. No problem. My pleasure. So to the listeners, if they want to find you online somewhere, where can they find you? If they want to reach out to you?
01:54:26
Speaker
They can always find me on LinkedIn. And I have to admit that I don't do much in the way of updating LinkedIn on websites because I vastly prefer direct contact, personal contact. So if you want to reach out, definitely feel welcome. You can find me on LinkedIn, LinkedIn slash in slash R-S-M-A-L-S, which is my initial letter and my last name, R Smalls.
01:54:49
Speaker
Or you can go to www.rsmalls.nl. So basically, again, my initial letter plus my last name. And there, of course, I was on there already as well. And there people can find more about InnoTap, something you mentioned earlier. It's just the innovation in theory and practice. It's like a small conference where
01:55:11
Speaker
business, government and academia meet. That is correct. We do that every year and it's going to be the 10th or 11th time this year again. So we done every time last Friday of September. It's in Dutch, it's in Nijmegen. So if you want to attend, it's free to attend. This year is going to be about robotics.
01:55:34
Speaker
Robots, cobots and artificial intelligence is going to be very nice. There's going to be companies on the stage talking about what they're going to do in terms of automation. It is still focused on the manufacturing industry, but we will also ask questions about meaningful work and how does all this factory automation influence us as humans.
01:55:55
Speaker
working in these companies. It's super interesting and there is usually still a place for some people to attend, so definitely go to my website and click some links. Also to everyone's listening, I'm going to put all of this, of course, also in the show notes. You can find that on the website that you don't have to. You can Google, of course, but you don't have to, including, of course, all these books and other things we talked about.
01:56:22
Speaker
Rafael, thank you so much for your time today. And to everyone's listening, you have a great day. Thank you very much.
01:56:31
Speaker
Hey everyone, just one more thing before you go. I hope you enjoyed the show and to stay up to date with future episodes and extra content, you can sign up to the blog and you'll get an email every Friday that provides some fun before you head off for the weekend. Don't worry, it'll be a short email where I share cool things that I have found or what I've been up to. If you want to receive that, just go to ajmal.com. A-D-J-M-A-L dot com. And you can sign up right there. I hope you enjoy.