TEXT 3.3. ENTERPRISE BY THE BOOK

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 325.

There was a time when entrepreneur ship used to conjure up images of personal greed. Today, says Nick Wilson, principal lecturer in entrepreneurship at Kingston University, entrepreneurship is no longer a dirty word. In fact, television programmes such as The Apprentice and Dragon's Den have done a lot to ignite people's interest in it and significant numbers are deciding they wouldn't mind a go at it themselves. As such, many are signing up to the increasing number of Masters courses in the subject. "There has been a huge number of people, particularly fresh graduates, deciding that they want to become entrepreneurs - although this doesn't necessarily mean they want to start up their own businesses," he says. "Employers are constantly saying - just as Sir Alan Sugar does - that they want more enterprising and entrepreneurial people to work for them. There are people
who work in anything from engineering to journalism that benefit from entrepreneurial behaviours."

Wilson believes that MAs and MScs in entrepreneurship are increasingly vital for such people. "They enable you to learn the behaviours you'll need, to put them into practice and to work out - if you need to - where you want to utilise them once you have them," he says.

Emma Harris, 25, an assistant account executive for the PR firm GolinHarris, believes her MSc in entrepreneurship, science and business from Nottingham University Business School helped her CV stand out from other graduates. "I had taken some business modules during my biology degree and really enjoyed them. But I was looking for something more than a straight business Masters," she says. "I came out with proof of excellent team working, leadership and communication skills and most of all, an ability to work innovatively."

Nottingham University was one of the first to introduce a Masters course in entrepreneurship. Like Wilson, Martin Binks, director of its Institute for Enterprise and Innovation, does not regard the ultimate objective as teaching people how to start up a business. "The aim is to enable them to realise a new project, whether that happens to be a lone business venture or a task within the NHS," he explains.

Students at Nottingham University take modules in subjects such as marketing, finance, innovation management and creative problem solving, as well as getting to work with a local business on a live issue. "The student spends several weeks with them and then has to present a report to show what they've discovered - it's one of the things students most like about the course," he says.

Some courses, he cautions, don't involve an element of work experience. "These courses focus on telling people how to become entrepreneurs, but our approach is to really engage them in it so that it affects their capabilities."

As with most Masters courses, students at Nottingham University get the chance to compile a business plan and they get to work in multi-disciplinary teams. "Many of our students study entrepreneurship with a specific subject like chemistry, electrical engineering or IT, whereby they spend 50 per cent of their time in the school of that subject and 50 per cent of their time here. What this means is that we can get people from the arts and people from the sciences to work together on specific projects and they wind up with a much richer set of solution related ideas."

Lorna Collins, director at the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship, approves. "Work experience with an objective and cross-disciplinary projects are things people should be looking for in Masters courses in entrepreneurship," she says. "Also worth looking out for are opportunities to shadow a founder manager or entrepreneur for a period of time."

Collins believes there are two main reasons for the rise in Masters courses in entrepreneurship. "One is that universities are realising one of the ways to commercialise the intellectual property of their students is to provide them with a mechanism to develop their ideas, and the other is that more funding has become available to launch such courses."

Every course has a slightly different slant, says Collins, who advises graduates to dig deep when researching the best one for them. "Every degree has a really comprehensive set of course information behind it and you only get a fraction of that in the prospectus. Students should ideally contact the programme director and find out about the precise content of the modules, what will be expected of them and what previous students have gone on to do."

While Masters courses aren't for everyone, she says that there are some very innovative ones out there. "Having done their research, students need to think carefully about whether there is a course that really suits their needs."

Richard Sant, principal lecturer in enterprise at the University of Portsmouth, points out that the cost of a Masters - which can reach up to ₤15,000 - leaves many people, particularly those who do want to set up their own business, with the conundrum of whether to fork out this kind of money for a course or simply go straight ahead with their lousiness idea. "It must be a very considered decision," he says.

Some courses, such as Portsmouth's MA in creative and cultural leadership don't have the word entrepreneurship in the title. "We see entrepreneurship as synonymous with leadership, so the title felt right for us," says Sant, who points out that, like some other courses, this one is aimed at people with more business experience than fresh graduates.

A current trend among Masters courses in entrepreneurship is the attempt to combine the subject with creative industries, such as sculpting, film-making and painting. Ian Chance, director of the MA in creative entrepreneurship at the University of East Anglia, explains: "These people are often in a position where entrepreneurship is the difference between success and failure."

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