Professor Sara Carter, Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, Strathclyde Business School

Forty years ago, many people believed that you couldn't teach marketing. It was regarded merely as selling, an innate skill confined to those born with the gift of the gab. Nowadays, there is a common understanding that marketing is an essential and multi-dimensional business skill. We no longer question whether marketing and selling can be taught and these subjects have been central to the management education curriculum for many years.

The analogy with marketing is appropriate for understanding how entrepreneurship has developed as a subject domain and is emerging as a core element of management education. 

Entrepreneurship focuses on the new venture creation process and its constituent elements: opportunity identification, resource acquisition and mobilisation, new venture start-up, and subsequent business growth. Of course, you may learn some of this "on the job", but trial and error is time-consuming, expensive and produces poor results.

The Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde Business School teaches entrepreneurship to undergraduates, who are more likely than ever to start their own businesses and to work in small and medium-sized enterprises. The current economic conditions will lead increasing numbers of people towards self-employment and business start-ups.

We want our students to start their business careers well prepared and with a full understanding of what entrepreneurship entails. Strathclyde Business School has been at the forefront of management education in Scotland for the past 40 years, a position we have achieved by delivering educational programmes prized for their quality and readily transferable knowledge and skills. Like other business schools, such as Harvard, Wharton, Babson, Cambridge, and MIT, we recognize the importance of entrepreneurship education. The question is not whether you can teach entrepreneurship, but whether our economy can afford for us not to teach it.

Dr Adrian Atkinson, Human Factors International

There are two main schools of thought about what makes an entrepreneur. The first is that given the right training, anyone can do it. My view is that you cannot train someone to be an entrepreneur. It takes a certain "type".

The strongly entrepreneurial person enjoys starting businesses and devotes all of his energy and time to making things happen, often at the expense of family, possessions and reputation. Restless and often dissatisfied with what is achieved, but very resilient and able to pick up and start again, the entrepreneur sees work as relaxation. This is not a result of genetics, though. Entrepreneurs are not born, they are made, through childhood experiences that provide them with rare attitudes and aptitudes necessary for success.

Yet key voices in government continue to mislead the public, refering to enterprise and entrepreneurship as though they were interchangeable. In October, John Denham, the Skills Secretary at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, approved new national skills academies for enterprise, power, IT and social care. He said: "Around 150,000 young people and adults will get the chance to develop world-class skills as entrepreneurs, IT workers, electrical engineers and social carers."

The media often promotes the view that anyone can become an entrepreneur. This encourages people to risk their money and create large personal debts. When people say they are going to sell everything and become an entrepreneur, I say "for goodness sake, don't". Very few people are wealth creators—they should realise where their strengths lie.

Psychometric assessments can identify those who have the characteristics to be wealth creators and which type they will be: experts, corporates, enterprisers ed in all businesses to make them successful.or serial entrepreneurs. I'd say the first three types are the key people required in all business to make them successful.