Are architects born or made? What about rock stars? Should we expect either group to undergo formal training? These are, what the sharper among you will have spotted, stupid questions. It’s evident that architects learn their trade through several years of gruelling formal qualifications, while a pop star merely has to appear on the right talent show to become an overnight sensation. But this masks the fact that those naïve X-Factor wannabes put in more hard slog than you might expect. Likewise, successful architects have a natural talent for design and a strong creative bent.
It doesn’t take much therefore to arrive at the startlingly obvious conclusion that some are born, some are made, but the huge majority are a mixture of both. And despite all the hand wringing and self-examination from within the start-up community, the same is true for entrepreneurs. But the nature or nurture debate has become one of the stocks in trade of the enterprise community. Get a panel of entrepreneurs together and it’s pretty easy to get them to debate this all day.
So it was no real surprise to see the launch of this year’s Global Entrepreneurship Week kick off with this very debate. Peter Jones, founder of the National Enterprise Academy, and one of the UK’s great enterprise champions, argued that anyone can be an entrepreneur and that what we need is more formal education around entrepreneurship. Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones (aka The Black Farmer) effectively made a case for nature, calling entrepreneurialism a state of mind: either we are born with it, or it has been pressed on us through necessity. The last thing we should be doing, he said, is sending these people off to pick up “poncey degrees”, training themselves for a life in the service industry and middle management.
Guess what? They’re both right. The latest neurological research suggests that a person’s attitude to risk-taking—not the whole entrepreneurial story, but certainly a part of it—has a lot to do with the functioning of the five different dopamine receptors in the brain. As anyone who has met a successful 12-year-old entrepreneur will confirm, there are “natural” entrepreneurs out there. They usually can’t imagine ever working for anyone else and are often scarily good at working for themselves from a frighteningly young age.
But what about all those blue-chip, ex-City lawyers who build up a healthy cushion before taking the leap to do their own thing? They’ve spent years working for others, but have learned a lot about commerce along the way and often create superb brands and businesses.
There are all sorts of entrepreneurs out there with different neurological constitutions—just as there are all sorts of skills that we can teach kids to encourage them to be entrepreneurial. But we can also teach other, perhaps less fortunate, people about enterprise. Prisoners about to be released and the long-term unemployed, for example, should also be benefiting from enterprise education. Far from simply tying our enterprise energies to schools, we should be spreading the message wherever possible.
Schemes, such as Enterprise UK’s Make Your Mark with a Tenner, or MyBnk’s Enterprise in a Box are great because they put schoolchildren at the heart of an enterprise experience. But we should be rolling those programmes out across all areas of society. There was a brilliant example at the launch of Make it Happen, the Prince’s Trust book on starting a business. A woman called Gina stood up and told her story. She started a floristry business while coming to the end of a six-year stretch in Holloway Prison. Her floristry business is still going five years later and she is now onto a second business, running a café. From a life on the fringes of society, she is now employing others and has the self-esteem to stand in front of strangers and tell her story. Whether she counts as born or made is an utter irrelevance.
There will be a lot of talk this week about the decade of the entrepreneur. But that will soon begin to sound like empty political rhetoric if we don’t do all we can to unlock the potential of every single would-be entrepreneur in the country, regardless of the dopamine receptors they were or weren’t blessed with at birth.