In academic literature, entrepreneurship has been widely acknowledged as an important mechanism for economic growth and employment creation. Various studies have shown that entrepreneurship is one of the most effective means for alleviating poverty in developing and transitional countries, and that increasing the quality and number of entrepreneurs creates employment and supports innovation and the economic empowerment of individuals. The time has now come for educational institutions in South Africa to play their part in developing entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship education needs a significant upgrade of its scope and scale. Entrepreneurship skills and the motivation to start a business should be brought to all students at universities, not only those registered specifically for entrepreneurship degrees. The goal is to increase start-up rates by enhancing students’ entrepreneurial skills and motivation.
Last year the Centre of Entrepreneurship at Sol Plaatje University launched a project in which all first-year students had to do a compulsory entrepreneurship course dealing with the change of mindset to become more entrepreneurial. This requires a radical mindset change for students, but also, critically, for educationalists and politicians. The leadership of universities need to initiate this change.
What role can universities in South Africa play in improving the entrepreneurial mindset and motivation of students and boosting start-ups? It is important to acknowledge the distinction between entrepreneurship education and business management. While business management courses are about leadership, administration, sales and marketing, entrepreneurship courses deal more with innovation, personal initiative, achievement orientation and risk-taking.
There is empirical evidence that entrepreneurship courses in South Africa are not necessarily achieving these goals. The most successful courses provide a thorough practical orientation to entrepreneurship education, focusing on learning by doing — whereby students are not only learning about entrepreneurship but also how to become entrepreneurial.
It is important to acknowledge the distinction between entrepreneurship education and business management. While business management courses are about leadership, administration, sales and marketing, entrepreneurship courses deal more with innovation, personal initiative, achievement orientation and risk-taking
My colleagues and I already demonstrated at the University of the Western Cape, to a statistically significant extent more than 15 years ago, in possibly the first controlled study on the African continent, that it is possible to change the entrepreneurial mindset of students, who at the time had to open and run a business in small groups.
The control group, which didn’t participate in this hands-on approach but participated in normal business courses, didn’t change their mindset at all. Successful students in the hands-on group also wanted to continue with their businesses after the end of the course — and many did so.
In recent large-scale research initiatives in African countries like Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania and Rwanda, where hundreds of students participated in, on average, 30 hours of practical entrepreneurial training, students improved their entrepreneurial mindset significantly compared with a control group that had taken a standard business-related course.
The focus of the training was an action-based intervention to enhance the entrepreneurial mindset and to support the creation of a small company. The training also aimed at supporting the personal initiative of participants (being self-starting, proactive and persistent), as well as goal setting, entrepreneurial environmental knowledge generation, action planning/execution, and self-efficacy. This is evidence-based best practice in entrepreneurship education in Africa.
There are many ways universities can help to reduce unemployment, and one of the most effective ways is through entrepreneurship education at universities
One year after the training, the results showed a huge increase in start-ups by the entrepreneurial training group. Eighteen months after the training, each student who participated had, on average, created 2.82 jobs — a clear indication that even a relatively short intervention can not only change the mindset of students but also boost start-ups and create employment.
It is also helpful to look at successful Asian countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, and examine how they have structured entrepreneurship education. In many of these universities entrepreneurship education is not only part of their vision and mission statements, but part of the real student experience: they even have compulsory basic entrepreneurship courses for all university students.
At the University of Ciputra in Indonesia, for example, no student can graduate if he or she has not started a business. There are many ways universities can help to reduce unemployment, and one of the most effective ways is through entrepreneurship education.
For the past five years there has been a discussion about an entrepreneurial university in South Africa. Topics are pathways for entrepreneurs, organisational capacity, leadership and governance, people and incentives, and entrepreneurship development in teaching and learning. A focus on an entrepreneurial university as an internationalised institution: university-business and external relationship for knowledge exchange.
Unfortunately, little has been implemented so far. We need action. Now!
• Dr Friedrich is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Giessen, Germany, and at Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley.
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