New textbook supports entrepreneurship training outside of the business school

Very few of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs went to business school, so it’s somewhat incongruous that Business Schools have claimed ‘ownership’ of the teaching of entrepreneurship. A new book aims to support the growing amount of entrepreneurial training taking place outside of the business school, teaching the skills and essential practical knowledge for specific markets. Entrepreneurship for Everyone challenges the notion that teaching entrepreneurship and creativity is all that is required to succeed in business.

Lead author, Rob Mellor, Director of Enterprise in the Faculty of Computing, Information Systems & Mathematics at Kingston University, believes that business schools are incapable of teaching the wide variety of deeply technical skills needed for successful entrepreneurship – and instead uses “embedded entrepreneurship”, with it’s roots firmly in the discipline being taught.

“Interest in entrepreneurship education is spreading to non-business disciplines, where students in engineering, life sciences and liberal arts are interested in becoming entrepreneurs,” said Mellor.

“There are more than 1,500 colleges and universities in the USA that offer some form of entrepreneurship training, and growth in the UK has been even more explosive, with over 500 courses offered at over 100 UK universities. This book is aimed at the aspiring student entrepreneurs from any academic discipline, so that we can ensure that they too – not just business students – possess the required technical background.”

Entrepreneurship for Everyone explores how to apply entrepreneurial ideas to a range of industries, including information technology, healthcare, biotechnology, as well as the music and creative industries. The authors, who each have first hand experience of delivering modules on entrepreneurship within their specialist fields, bring alive the crucial issues for understanding this dynamic field.

The skills the book advocates go beyond how to establish a new service or product, or set up a new company. “Entrepreneurship training teaches you how to be more enterprising, more creative, more innovative, more commercially aware and more self-motivated,” says Mellor. “Anybody can be an entrepreneur at any stage in their life and indeed it could be argued that learning the tools of business creation is a skill that, if learnt now, may come in useful if not in the immediate future, then perhaps in 20 years time.”

Entrepreneurship for Everyone is written by Robert B. Mellor with Gary Coulton, Anne Chick, Antonia Bifulco, Noha Mellor and Alan Fisheris and is published by SAGE, available in paperback and hardcover here.

For those who want a feel for the contents, there’s a free PDF available of the contents and the first chapter.

www.sagepublications.com