Do Entrepreneurs need an MBA? Nunzio Quacquarelli

Entrepreneurship is really the spirit and the commitment to start your own business, and that's something that you can't really teach. You can create an environment where it can prosper. So a lot of business schools focus on entrepreneurship, and the reason they're attracted to would-be entrepreneurs is because they gather a pool of people with a common goal to start their own business, and then they share ideas, share motivations, they create a support network for each other. So you can cultivate that spirit and that ambition for entrepreneurship. Many people start their own businesses without an MBA background. If you have a really clear vision of what you want to do and you feel that you have the skills that you need to be successful in your business, then you don't need to take the time or the cost of doing an MBA. But if you don't feel that you have clarity and you need time to think through what your business goal will be, or if you feel that you have the need to develop some of the skills to be able to improve the probability of your success, then I think an MBA can be really helpful in terms of what you can teach at a business school. I think you can teach some of the skills that make it more likely that you're going to be successful. So you know, I went to the Wharton School, and my motivation in going to Wharton was really to act as an insurance policy for my future entrepreneurial career. I wanted to give myself the best chance of success. I thought if I'm going to spend my career building a business, I want to know that I have the toolkit to succeed. And I wanted to make sure that I improved in my marketing skills, my sort of corporate finance skills, and just fundamental accounting skills which I didn't have any background in before I embarked on an entrepreneurial career. So can you teach core skills that can help you be a successful entrepreneur? Yes. Can you teach the spirit of entrepreneurship? No, but you can cultivate it.

The business school network is a key benefit of going to business school, and for an entrepreneur it's perhaps different from other professional pursuits. You're going to have a network of alumni and other people are going to recognize your MBA and are more likely to invest in you if you have a good-quality MBA. Your MBA is going to give you a network of people who will be running their own businesses, who are potentially going to be buying your products and services at some point in the future. Probably the most important thing is access to knowledge. So you're going to meet professors, fellow students who are just going to have complementary ideas and knowledge they're going to share with you, which is going to stimulate your business thinking or help you in the evolution of your business in the future.

The MBA is right for anyone who has done the research and preparation to feel that it's going to get them to where they want to be in their career. So someone with a tech background who wants to start their own business probably needs to broaden the horizons, needs to develop some general management skills so they're going to be successful in running the business. So in that context, if that's their ambition, absolutely. Equally, if somebody with a tech background wants to do a business where they're programming all day long, I'd probably say no, the MBA isn't going to help to develop you to be a programmer. If you come from a background of startups or accelerators and you've kind of got that entrepreneurial bent already, then maybe you want to use your MBA to broaden into other areas and really focus on your marketing skills or all the technical financial skills that are going to really drive your success in the future. On the other hand, for the majority of people, they don't have that background pre-MBA.

I majored in entrepreneurship at Wharton, and I think it was really helpful, as I said, to be surrounded by a community of people with a common goal of starting their own business. You sort of learn from their own approaches, their mindsets, you share ideas, and that can be very stimulating to your own idea generation. It can also be very motivating and give you the confidence to say he will start a business, she will start a business, I think I can do it as well. So feeding off their energy and learning from them in terms of their drives and motivations can be a kind of key benefit.

I think business schools can help in other ways after your MBA. So for example, many business schools now have developed incubators where in that critical early stage where many businesses fail, they actually provide the support, maybe it's office facilities or infrastructure that can help you to save costs and also provide you with some mentoring to help you get through that difficult phase. They're also increasingly providing direct access to venture capital. So you know, many business schools have evaluation programs so you get through certain rounds of evaluation and then you qualify to be put in front of a panel, and they will lend you significant sums of money to help your business get going. So those are two direct practical ways in which business schools can really help you.