Bill Aulet: learning entrepreneurship

On 19 October in the city of Castellón, Bill Aulet the author of “Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 steps to launch a successful start-up” explained how to teach entrepreneurship. Apart from an exhaustive methodology to work in each innovative project undertaken, the Director of the MIT Center of Entrepreneurs emphasised the importance of creating ecosystems that promote the entrepreneur spirit, and of putting some vitally important skills to work when materialising successful innovative ideas.

His 24-step methodology emerged from the growing entrepreneurship activity that takes place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where a mean of 900 companies are created every year as a response to the growing ecosystem demand. Entrepreneurship is fashionable, but people are not aware about everything that creating an innovative project and it remaining sustainable involves. So here lies the importance of teaching entrepreneurship to our students, Bill said during this conference.

Nowadays, we are facing a crisis as to the way to teach entrepreneurship. We have focused on teaching entrepreneurship through successful or failing cases and stories in recent years, which has produced personalities and moments with which future businesspeople will be able to identify themselves, and will thus reinforce the entrepreneurial spirit. Yet at the same time, we have come up with false expectations that have made creating an innovative company and making it grow seem simple, when the exact opposite is actually true.

In short, starting out on innovating and technology-based projects is hard work and requires: firstly, discipline and methodology; secondly, no matter how good your idea is, you will not develop it successfully if you do not have certain skills and spirit, and generating suitable ecosystems in which different social agents are involved is absolutely basic.