Vivek Wadhwa on Business School Entrepreneurs
There is a great article on TechCrunch titled Winner’s Curse: Why Losing a B-School Biz Plan Competition Is Better Than Winning by Vivek Wadhwa, entrepreneur turned academic, Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Its about elevator pitching, competitions for graduate business school entrepreneurs and the differentiation between good ideas and unrealistic expectation or bad execution.
Vivek argues that the winners of these business school entrepreneurship competitions never end up as the bright star companies of the real business world. Why? Because the students lack the necessary detailed technical industry knowledge that incorporates into their analysis, details that they need to push that idea through to its potential commercial realisation. They generally win the competition, receive an injection of money and have little chance against the forces of the real world due to lack of that real world experience. In fact, the people judging such competitions are usually generalists with little idea about the technical realities of the pitches they judge.
In the end, Vivek argues, its better to enter these business school competitions and not win because the winning may not be the stimulus that the young entrepreneur really needs at that point of an idea or career. I particularly like these points made in the article:
Business plan competitions don’t breed winning businesses. Rather than winning a beauty contest, building a business is a marathon that requires steady and constant effort, surmounting regular difficulties, and living through emotional peaks and valleys.Vivek Wadhwa
Still, these competitions are invaluable tools for the young upcoming entrepreneurs fresh out of business school in honing their skills and teaching them how to pull it all together. They offer invaluable networking and collaboration opportunities and potentially hold the key to bigger and better things. Let’s not forget, as Vivek points out, that the failure to execute in the real world doesn’t necessarily mean these people aren’t putting forward great ideas, albeit with faulted execution.
Finally, let’s not confuse failure to execute or unrealistic plan expectations with bad ideas. Young CEOs going into industries they barely know armed with b-school plan competition money are like lambs to the slaughter. But the core idea behind their plan may be quite innovative and powerful. Vivek Wadhwa
As an MBA (Journalism and Media Studies) student looking to graduate at the end of 2010 (and enrolled in the Entrepreneurship unit for semester two) this is a grounding article I thought worthy of sharing – even paraphrasing and quoting – for one simple reason. The one thing that inexperience fails to flag in oneself is the true lack of experience one really has to contend with… if that makes sense. Remember being a teenager (I’m now 45) and people said you were inexperienced and you felt indignant at that suggestion. But how could you have known? How could you have really appreciated what experience was unless you’d had actual life experiences yourself – as a teenager you simply didn’t have a point of reference to assess yourself against the criteria of experience.
Which is an element of what Vivek seems to be driving at in a sense. My focus this year is about experience. Failing at business ventures leads to experience which leads to better business in an evolutionary sense. And hopefully we’ll all make a little more money in 2011… and onwards. For this year, its just about experience and finishing this post-graduate business qualification.
