NEWS
campusreview.com.au
Entrepreneurs on
entrepreneurship
Company founder argues too many people
teaching business development at university are
academics without real-world knowledge.
By James Wells
T
he saying “never trust a skinny chef”
has been applied to academia
by education entrepreneur Mat
Jacobson, who said university lecturers
who’ve never run a start-up should not be
teaching courses in entrepreneurship.
Jacobson, founder of Dūcere Global
Business School, which partners with
universities to deliver business degrees
that align to industry needs, said when
you look into the backgrounds of those
teaching entrepreneurship subjects and
courses, they’re career academics, not
business people.
“If you look at the academic profile of
those teaching an entrepreneurship degree
at most universities, you’ll just essentially
see an academic background, two years
lecturing in this unit in accounting, three
years lecturing in management in this area,
and now a lecturer in entrepreneurship,”
Jacobson said. “What’s the validity of this
6
person teaching you and telling you how
to become an entrepreneur, when they’ve
never been an entrepreneur and never run
a business? You might get the occasional
academic who did something in a startup environment, probably not something
remarkable but maybe had a small business
that they were engaged in.”
It’s the entrepreneurs who should be
teaching entrepreneurship, Jacobson said.
He said universities should enlist the people
behind business success stories to teach
students, and that students should have to set
up their own businesses in order to graduate,
rather than just pumping out essays.
“The other problem with most university
environments is you can learn all the
theory, and do the textbook analysis,
and write the essay, and come out with
a degree,” Jacobson explained. “In our
programs, either entrepreneurship or social
entrepreneurship, you can’t just come out
with a piece of paper. You have to launch a
viable enterprise to graduate. The piece of
paper is just a means to an end. It’s not the
outcome that we’re looking for.”
“You go through all the building blocks,
the stepping stones, of user group, focus
groups, market testing, validity, investment
engagement, and then getting to a point
where you have a viable enterprise at the end
of that process, and constantly monitoring,
adapting, and evolving your business model
over the course of the degree program,” he
continued. “It’s about getting the skills, the
support, and the tools to be an entrepreneur,
rather than teaching and lecturing in the
theory of entrepreneurship.”
Aside from Dūcere, Jacobson has
established three businesses in tertiary
education, two property investment
companies in Australia and the US, and a
technology incubator in Melbourne.
In August, he partnered with the University
of Canberra to launch its bachelor of
entrepreneurship and bachelor of social
entrepreneurship. These degrees are two
years long and operate on a trimester model.
Students travel around the world – including
to Silicon Valley in the US and to China – to
learn from business leaders.
Professor Lawrence Pratchett, dean of
UC’s Faculty of Business, Government
and Law, said university teaching needs to
become entrepreneurial.
“Education must adapt to these new
requirements,” Pratchett said. “The
traditional tertiary education models are
no longer optimally suited for the needs of
today’s students.”
Simon Eassom, global manager of the
education arm of IBM and a member of
Deakin University’s university council, said
earlier this year that academics have to be
“dragged kicking and screaming out of their
research units” to engage with change.
“The people who are employed by
universities don’t want to change, they’re
in the most sheltered workshop on the
planet,” Eassom said.
However, a report from Open Universities
Australia and the tech industry-sponsored notfor-profit New Media Consortium, disagreed.
It stated that academics want change and
are innovative, but they’re hampered by old
infrastructure and technology.
“Educators are often trying to design
new, innovative learning models that must
be integrated with outdated, pre-existing
technology and learning management
systems,” the report stated. ■