By Jenny Santillan-Santiago
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 06:44:00 09/15/2008
MANILA, Philippines—Entrepreneurs are born, not made.
That may have been true before but in today’s cut-throat business competitions, the notion has become passé.
“What may be inborn is the appetite for risk-taking, which you can’t teach, but creativity and inspiration, without discipline, are fatal,” said Dr. Ricardo Lim, associate dean of AIM-W. SyCip Graduate School of Business.
He said good business ideas would fail without management techniques, a “steady science” that could be learned in school.
Education was important if an entrepreneur was to succeed, said K. Brian Keegan, managing director and global head for Capital Structure Advisory and Solutions of JP Morgan Securities, New York.
Lim and Keegan were among the speakers at the recent “Entrepreneurship and Innovation in a Complex World” forum sponsored by the Asian Institute of Management (AIM).
The event launched the school’s new programs on innovation and entrepreneurship.
Generating wealth
“Entrepreneurs are in the business of making money and our greatest mission is to prepare people to generate wealth for generations to come,” said Keegan. “Entrepreneurs search for innovative ways to create wealth.”
The speakers said education was important because a person turning a good idea into a business would need managerial skills to make the enterprise grow.
Lim said educational institutions like AIM could help provide a person the knowledge and skills to find investors by teaching him to communicate an idea and to improve an existing product so it would appeal to different markets.
He gave as example businessman Vicvic Villavicencio. “He started with Saisaki then expanded his concept from Japanese to Western and continued to improve his business by buying all his materials in bulk so he can afford to give his customers lower prices.”
Lim said AIM’s new MBA Major in Entrepreneurship program (MBA-entrep) would equip students with “steady science” in managing business systems, finance, accounting, people and teams, marketing, etc.
He said an entrepreneur generated “a win-win situation,” creating value or positive experiences for customers by using innovative techniques.
Another example he gave was AIM graduate Raffy David who engaged in door-to-door passport delivery. David’s business makes things easier for both passport applicant and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).
New ways
AIM dean Victoria Licuanan said renowned economist Joseph Schumpeter described entrepreneurship as “creative destruction” because new ways of doing things would replace and even destroy old ones.
An entrepreneur must constantly create new businesses or scale them up since the world is constantly changing.
Lim said this was the key to the success of Tony Fernandez of Air Asia and Tony Tan Caktiong of Jollibee, who both “have an appetite for risk, have big ideas for new ventures, and have the ambition to grow in quantum leaps.”
Fernandez adopted the western concept of budget travel while Tan transformed a small Cubao ice cream store into a big fastfood chain.
But a college degree does not necessarily develop the “entrepreneurial mentality,” or the willingness to invest and take risks.
“At AIM, we try to develop the student’s entrepreneurial mentality, and teach him how to start a business, how to communicate his business plan, how to honestly assess the environment,” Lim said.
Case method
The MBA-entrep program uses the case method. Students learn more from each other’s experiences.
The 16-month program, to be taken after the regular core MBA, offers courses that are oriented towards innovation, entrepreneurship, seeking venture-capital, and developing business models. In the core MBA course, students learn thinking and analytical skills to solve complex problems.
Lim said the new MBA-entrep program was aimed at younger people “who need to develop the entrepreneurial mentality to take risks; or who may already have that kind of mentality but don’t know how to start a business; or who are still in the process of developing a business idea.”
While many MBA-entrep students might not want to become entrepreneurs right after graduation, Lim said, “The MBA-entrep degree gives them time to incubate ideas, time to develop the entrepreneurial mentality and to accumulate the technical skills they need, and help locate the actual resources to put their ideas into action.”
Dr. Grace Ugut, associate dean of AIM-Executive Education and Lifelong Learning Center, said the Executive Education Program for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners was another new program designed to address the special challenges of entrepreneurial and family-managed firms.
To fit the learning needs and schedules of entrepreneurs and business owners, aspects of the courses might be conducted online or face-to-face in a classroom setting, she said.
Ugut said the program helped promote the development of firms and entrepreneurs through a three-tier approach:
Top tier provides broad strategic management education to break barriers to participants’ and their businesses’ growth and transformation.
Core tier, a three-week development program, aims to professionalize entrepreneurial management by building core business leadership competencies.
Base tier are two- to three-day entrepreneurship courses addressing specific skills training needs—business plan writing, finance, marketing, strategy, and supply chain management.
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