An Opportunity to Create Entrepreneurs Through Entrepreneurship Education

Nawaf Al-Ebraheem, Mishal Bouresly and Saud Al-Saber (MBA Graduates)
Case-Study for Entrepreneurship and New Business Ventures (ENBV)
Kuwait Maastricht Business School, Kuwait

Khalid sat in his coach-class seat on the way back from a True Leadership seminar he had just attended outside Kuwait with Tom McCarthy, thinking of Tom's words about defining yourself and creating your own vision. "Be focused, be determined" Tom said. Khalid was sipping on his orange juice when he suddenly had a vision, after an intensive workshop. He envisioned a better Kuwait by developing an entrepreneurial spirit in individuals and motivating them to change their lives; to create their own business and lead their own ways toward success.

Educating Entrepreneurs

When Khalid started his business, his main focus was to teach an essential characteristic of the entrepreneurial spirit, which is leadership. Khalid Thought that through leadership, individuals can be inspired to set a vision and work toward meeting their goals. Also, leadership was thought by Khalid as the main access to freedom and the key that opens the door for entrepreneurs to establish their own businesses. It is the same dose of courage he needed from Tom to set him free and resign from his job at that time to pursue his own venture, Leaders Enterprises.

Khalid had asked Tom to come to Kuwait and introduce the True Leadership seminar to professionals and new business starters that needed a little dose of enthusiasm. "I'm not sure whether there is a potential number of entrepreneurs in Kuwait that would seize this opportunity." Tom said.  At that time, Khalid was confident that entrepreneurs in Kuwait needed the proper education to give them enough push to jump start their motivation engines.  Khalid knew this from experience that many entrepreneurs in Kuwait do not have the proper education that steers them toward the right direction in dealing with their businesses. "Don't worry, Tom, the need here for such motivation is a must." Khalid responded.

Thus, Khalid had planned to start a new revolutionized way of teaching entrepreneurs how to establish their businesses and lead their teams toward growth and success. He started targeting the traits of entrepreneurs and tried to strengthen them through proper education, motivational seminars, and workshops.  His main concentration was on teaching people to deal with risk at acceptable levels and enhancing decision making skills. The main reason why entrepreneurship education had motivated Khalid to pursue this career was not money. It was the need he felt – as the IT assistant manager at his previous job – to educate himself and his staff to become leaders at their jobs and become free and motivated.

Challenges and Motivations

The main challenge of entrepreneurship education as seen by Khalid was how to find those entrepreneurs and persuade them to take the proper education before starting their entrepreneurial activities. Khalid was faced with individuals that belong to a laid-back culture, where people didn't mind working at their secured, but unproductive jobs, and were satisfied with the slow pace at which their career advancement was moving. To overcome this obstacle, Khalid planned a research method in which he would go door-to-door and meet with chief executives and team leaders of major companies in Kuwait to educate them about leadership and the role of entrepreneurship within their organization. Khalid thought if he started from inside-out and top-to-bottom he would eventually reach those individuals who had developed potential entrepreneurial skills within their working environment.

So Khalid started with Tom's True Leadership seminar to motivate top managers to lead their teams and give them enough enthusiasm and freedom to achieve their goals within the organization. He implemented his entrepreneurship education program to affect top levels first and depended on the fact that this knowledge would eventually be transferred to team members and, therefore, would affect the whole organization. Next, Khalid targeted communication skills of those individuals because he noticed that many entrepreneurs in Kuwait did not possess the skills to communicate with their business partners. So, he offered Communication and Presentation Skills and Secrets of Power Negotiation seminars.

What motivated Khalid to pursue this career and initiate his plan to search for entrepreneurs and prepare them properly to enhance their careers was the fact that Kuwait had all the main resources to raise entrepreneurs and support them with their new ventures. Kuwait had a high level of literacy which meant to Khalid that people were willing to be educated about entrepreneurship.

Second, Financial institutes offered a variety of loan options to help entrepreneurs establish their business, and easy payment methods that would guarantee minimal interest rates. Also, government support to raise such entrepreneurs was obvious through initiatives started by the government such as Kuwait Technology Incubator Project. This project was meant to provide the essential resources (i.e. raw materials, laboratories, finance, and training) for inventors and idea creators to start implementing their ideas and encourage them to pursue the investment in their own businesses. Also, venture capitalist such as Kuwait Small Project Development Company started to target those entrepreneurs to motivate them to put their ideas into action plans by offering them enough financial resources.

Advantages of Entrepreneurship Education

Through his experience with the many educational and motivational seminars, Khalid was able to determine that entrepreneurship education had increased his confidence in his own business plan and made it easier to manage. After completing many leadership and communication workshops on yearly basis in Florida, Khalid sat in his office room at home and gathered his thoughts. Before he would set up his entrepreneurship educational program, he had to think about how those individuals would benefit the most it.  He noted down that entrepreneurship education had developed his strategic thinking and made his business mind more focused at his goals to achieve his mission.

Moreover, Khalid found another advantage of entrepreneurship education to be the increase in self-motivation and decrease in risk averseness. After he took those leadership and communication workshops, he was more willing to deal with public and motivate himself to strategically establish his business and meet his goals. Khalid couldn't have done all this without first understanding the risk of dealing in such business and accept considerable amount of it to better manage his business. Thus, Entrepreneurship education had taught Khalid before how to take risk into account when doing his business.

Khalid kept digging deep into his thoughts to find out that entrepreneurship education had shifted his paradigm from a laid-back employee working for others with a sense of "looking busy doing nothing", to a forward-moving, focused, and enthusiastic self-employed genius. All these advantages of entrepreneurship education were the focus of Khalid's brain storming that night. These positive thoughts had lead Khalid to establish a strong business plan with a clear vision that empowers leadership within managers and self-motivated individuals.

Disadvantages of Entrepreneurship Education

Of course that night was not over for Khalid. As he finished noting down the advantages on entrepreneurship education, he started concentrating on the disadvantages. Khalid had learned from communicating with people who felt the need to start their own businesses that some of those people did not posses the basic traits to become entrepreneurs. Moreover, he felt that the main disadvantage of this education was that it would be hard to predict the level of success of individuals within their organizations or their own businesses.

Therefore, he concluded that in order to educate individuals in the field of entrepreneurship, they must initially have developed basic entrepreneurial traits such as willingness to take risk, self-motivation, and ambition. This had slowed Khalid down and made him think about the skills of people that would join his seminars and how to target the segment he intended to concentrate on for his entrepreneurial program. He also concluded from his observations that people in Kuwait were not aware of the importance of entrepreneurship education and the benefits behind it. Therefore, this matter was taken for granted by many people and was seen as an extra load on laid-back workers who sat their vision solely on their retirement plan.

After that long night, Khalid was sure that his plans were set strategically and his target market had been defined. His focus was to bring as many motivational speakers and entrepreneurship educators to target those individuals with potential entrepreneurship spirit and motivate them to lead themselves and other team players to success.

Results and Findings

After every seminar, Khalid sat with the individuals to discuss how these entrepreneurial programs had changed their lives. One sales manager at a real estate company was able to confess to Khalid that her productivity and creativity had increased ever since she attended the True Leadership seminar. It had inspired her to set her vision within her department and focus on the goals of the team. She mentioned to Khalid in a small interview that entrepreneurship education had set her apart from the rest of the laid-back managers and had secured a successful business plan and sales growth through the improvement of business skills. Khalid was able to convince her to join another seminar called Communication and Presentation Skills which concentrated on improving the communication skills of key players such as marketing and sales managers.

This manager was already set for a success story. She joined the Communication and Presentation Skills seminar and had met with Khalid again to ask for more seminars. She proved that entrepreneurship education was the reason she became more motivated and enthusiastic at doing her job. She also recommended her staff to attend the leadership seminar to strengthen their creativity and set their minds free and focused on achieving their goals.

Another person Khalid had met with was a laid-back employee who couldn't find a way to advance within the company he worked for. So he attended most of the seminars offered by Leaders Enterprises and was able to get promoted to assistant manager within 2 years of attending the first seminar.

Conclusion

Khalid knew from the beginning that since he was able to shift his paradigm and create a fortune for himself, that many other individuals in Kuwait were able to become entrepreneurs themselves. A few doses of education, motivation, and leadership were needed to bring about the entrepreneurial skills in those individuals.

Although the culture in Kuwait rejected entrepreneurship and recommended family members to spend their money wisely and save them in secure bank accounts to avoid risk, Khalid saw the opportunity to go against the odds and establish his venture that would only create more entrepreneurs and cause the culture as whole to shift its paradigm from a laid-back, risk averse culture to forward-moving, advanced, and entrepreneurial environment that would guarantee leadership style amongst corporations and individuals.

One night, Khalid laid his head back on the pillow of his king-size bed imagining the story. It was the story of his success as entrepreneur and entrepreneurship educator.  He shared with people how he envisioned a better Kuwaiti culture through the paradigm shift he was planning to influence onto this culture to bring about leadership style in every individual and create an entrepreneurial culture that benefits individuals and organizations in Kuwait. That night Khalid rested his soar mind and slept tight.