Today I will be viewing 9 final entrepreneurship presentations from 19 Honors College students, of which 15 have never previously experienced a business course. However, these student’s presentations will be of equal, if not higher, quality than the ones I viewed from my graduating Management students last week.
This is not to say that my Management students did not perform at expectations, they did. This speaks centrally to the point that my Honors students are passionate about a technical field, and have choosen to take my class to learn how to develop that technical skill into real community value.
They have an idea, they have the passion and they have the understanding that entrepreneurship is the means to an end.
Since Management is not a technical skill, business students do not carry the passion and conceptual understanding.
To prove that point, I will just say that each of the Honors students, today, would be able to estimate the five components of their startup financial requirement for almost any proposed business concept (working capital, cash conversion, assets, soft costs & contingency funds), without use of a cash flow statement – just as we would expect a graduating senior in the business school. I would estimate that only 1/3 of my graduating Management class would be able to perform that same task, if asked.
In addition, the Honors students, of their own initiative, have chosen projects outside their current fields of study. I can think of no better argument for our current cross-campus entrepreneurship initiative then the work of these students.
Have you, or are you, experiencing the same trends in the marketplace? If so, I would love to hear your comments.