Engineer-A-Business

Traditionally, it has been believed that entrepreneurs should go to business school and receive an MBA.  It is now coming to light that this is probably not the best approach for most entrepreneurs to pursue.

The biggest problem with the traditional model towards business success is that most business schools do not teach their students how to be innovative thinkers or actively teach them how to take the initiative they would need to be successful as entrepreneurs.  Business schools focus on teaching students how to fit in with the traditional structured environment with the expectation that they will be migrating into the corporate world.  They will occasionally mention that it is important to challenge the status quo, but in actuality they teach their students to conform to it far more often.  Students are taught how to solve problems and that if they use a different solution they will not be successful.  Obviously, such philosophies are the enemy of true entrepreneurship and many find that attending business school will actually dampen their lust for innovation.

Conversely, engineering students are regularly instructed not only to challenge the status quo, but how they can do so successfully.  The curriculum of an engineering program is centered around innovative thinking.  It is no coincidence that so many great entrepreneurs came from educational backgrounds in the fields of engineering, physics and computer science.  In a career that is centered around the importance of innovation.  It is counterproductive to pursue a field of study that so often crushes the innovative spirit. 

In addition to being greater innovators, engineers have something else going for them that many business school graduates do not: their stronger analytical skills.  One of the differences I observed between my engineering and business school programs was that MBA students are taught to think of the world as being black and white and look for consistent, linear relationships between variables.  One example is the beta correlation coefficient, which assumes that there is a direct and unvarying relationship between the performance of an individual security and the performance of the stock market as a whole.  Such trivial relationships rarely hold water in the real world and engineers are taught to analyze data to come up with models that are more reflective of the environments they are trying to understand.  As they have a better understanding of how elements interact, engineers can better understand the business world and how it is affected by those fundamental variables and influences.

The most common reason people tend to think that engineers often make the best entrepreneurs is because engineers know how to develop new products that satisfy the needs of their customers better than those of other businesses.  Of course, this is a very good explanation for many engineers’ successes in developing successful businesses of their own, as unique products are usually the most powerful way for companies to distinguish themselves from their competitors.  However, the notion that technology businesses are often the most successful because the products they are offer are more original may not be entirely true.  Another explanation is that technology businesses are founded by entrepreneurs who know how to mix their pursuit for innovation with strategic thinking.

Last Updated (27 May 2010)