Page 128 - 1-Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development by Norman Walzer (z-lib.org)

What Makes a Successful Entrepreneur? 117

provide assistance that is skill level appropriate. It facilitates the creation of a
“game plan” for developing skills, and it allows the tracking of an entrepre-
neur’s progress toward developing those skills over time.

Developing Entrepreneurship Skills
How can entrepreneurship skills be developed in a systemic, systematic,
and strategic way? The ELS does this by designing a system whose architec-
ture separates the function of developing entrepreneurs from the function
of addressing their needs for technical and financial assistance. The activi-
ties of these two complementary subsystems—referred to as the Entrepre-
neur Development Sub-System and the Service Provision Sub-System—are
then coordinated to allow entrepreneurs to successfully advance up the lad-
der of skill development in a transformational way.
While many individuals and organizations in the classroom and the field
impart knowledge, deliver training, dispense information, and engage in
short-term coaching, no one is actually developing entrepreneurs’ skills in
the pure sense of that term. Current programs in enterprise development
only deal with half of the equation for economic success; they address the
needs that firms have for technical and financial assistance but do little to
build a pipeline of highly skilled entrepreneurs capable of using that assis-
tance effectively to build companies.
It is commonly assumed that entrepreneurs are ready for this assistance
when it is offered. In fact, they often are not ready to effectively and fully
utilize the help provided. This is because being able to appropriately use
technical and financial resources is a function of the entrepreneur’s skill
level. If skill level and resource are not properly matched, the desired out-
come will not be achieved. The missing function in most communities or
regions is one that is responsible for creating a supply of highly skilled en-
trepreneurs capable of building successful companies—the Entrepreneur
Development Sub-System.
The development of skills requires transformational change—that is,
fundamental change and a leap to a higher level of performance (Lich-
tenstein and Lyons 2001). It is not achieved through the individual,
short-term, transactional exchanges that are the norm in our society and
that characterize enterprise development, in particular. Transactions,
taken alone, can never produce a transformation. Individual courses,
training programs, idea exchanges, consulting, and similar activities,
while helpful, will not develop an entrepreneur’s skills. To develop these
skills requires coordinated, long-term, sustained interactions. Since ser-
vice provider operations and their funding are not designed for these
purposes, it is not, and should not be, the responsibility of individual
service provider organizations to develop entrepreneurs. This requires the