Creative Entrepreneurship in an MBA Program
beatvit is a Beat The GMAT community member who is currently enrolled in George Washington Universitys Part-Time MBA program. He will be regularly contributing articles to share his perspective of life as a part-time MBA student. Be sure to check out his blog, or ask him questions about his experiences in this forum thread.
There was another awesome class in Entrepreneurship this week. From the two first classes it seems that the main purpose of our instructor in this class is to evoke our creativity and show us how indispensable it is for those of us who aspire to venture on our own or join a start-up after getting our MBA degree, and in business environment in general.
Our professoralready mentioned that in a seven week module there will be not enough time for all the material that used to be covered under the standard format of 14 weeks/3 credits. So some parts of the old course will be squeezed out from our current course. Namely, writing the business plan, among other things.Based on the syllabus we will still have an opportunity to try our hand in preparing Executive Summary and doing the Elevator Pitch.
But, as it seems, creativity is not going to be sacrificed in the course. I actually have had this dilemma about the MBA program in general. The standard curriculumin most business schools is focused on introducing the students to a rather rigid, formalized way of thinking andmanipulatingthe data. It is also geared to equip us with the standardized tool set for solving business problems. This is, no doubt, a very important skill set to acquire in business school. However, I always had this thought in the back of my mind, that this rigid approach, exacerbated bythe fast pace of packing a lot of knowledge in a short period of time, would force us into a very formal, standardized and somewhat narrow mind set, which would not allow us to develop softer, but still very important, business skills including creative businessthinking.
As a matter of fact, I remember reading an article thesummer before the start of my MBA program, that one of the complaints from the recruiters was that the MBAgraduates in generalwere well equipped in "hard" business skills, such as analyzing financial statements, or performing statistic analysis, but they were relatively lacking in the "softer" skills, like leadership and negotiations. I don't remember if creativity was explicitly mentioned among those "underdeveloped" soft skills, but this is what came to my mind when I was reading the article.
That's why I personally see this creativity slant in the Entrepreneurship course as a welcome respite from some other less "creative" classes. To some degree I feel that my "right-brainness" is rehabilitated in this class. Not that I am the most creative person in the room, but I have always thought of myself being more on the creative side of business.
Anyways, back to this week's class. This time the professor brought in one of his PhD students and let him run the class. The guy was no less enthusiastic on the subject of creativity than the professor. And since he is younger, he brought evenmore energy in presentation. Admittedly, we did not learn much in a formal way, but he provided some invaluable pointers for further learning and provoked us to let ourselves play. Overall it was a well-prepared and conducted interactive presentation on the subject of creativity in entrepreneurship and business at large.
Just a couple of things the PhD student gave us as interesting resources:
- The IDEO company is a company whose focus "lies at the intersection of insight and inspiration, and is informed by business, technology, and culture".
- Another is the recommended book on fostering creativity A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative
. I already ordered it in the library. If I like it, I am planning to buy it later.
I also found these two recent articles in Businessweek on Entrepreneurship being hot among MBAs now that the traditional MBA jobs in finance, investment,and consulting have become more scarce and less lucrative: