By Andrew Maxwell.
When talking to academic colleagues about teaching an entrepreneurship class, I have often been challenged about the benefits of teaching people about entrepreneurship and innovation. While they acknowledge their importance – they question whether you can teach people to be entrepreneurs or innovators because these are inherent characteristics that you are born with.
There is obviously an element of truth in this observation based on research on the psychology of entrepreneurship and the evidence that entrepreneurs and innovators have certain characteristics. Such evidence supports those questioning the value of teaching individuals to be more entrepreneurial and innovative. In a discussion with the authors of a new book “The Innovator’s DNA”, I asked Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen that question, as the very title of the book suggests entrepreneurs and innovators are born not made – the ‘nature vs nurture’ argument.
In their response, they provide some deep insights into company founders, and innovative behaviours linked to success. They observe that entrepreneur and innovator behaviours are a combination of both nature and nurture. They cite evidence of the different personalities of twins brought up separately, whose characteristics are about 70% based on the environment in which they grow up. They also offer an insight into how entrepreneurial or innovative characteristics are measured, pointing out that it is not a yes or no characteristic, but in fact, people have different levels of each characteristic. These levels correspond to a normal distribution of the population (for non- statisticians, this is known as a bell curve). They suggest that the purpose of teaching people to be more innovative or more entrepreneurial is not to take people with very low levels of these characteristics and make them very high – but to move them up at the continuum, and increase their manifestations of entrepreneurial and innovative behaviours.
This valuable insight explains why we write books and papers and teach. We hope that we can increase the amount of innovative and entrepreneurial behaviours displayed by our readers and students. To view the full interview you can go to Featured Videos.
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