Page 179 - 1-Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development by Norman Walzer (z-lib.org)

168 Joseph Kayne

In 2005, 56 students from the Richard T. Farmer School of Business par-
ticipated in a summer entrepreneurship course at the Miami University
Dolibois Education Center in Luxembourg. The students were divided into
teams and then asked to compare entrepreneurship activity in each of 12
non-English speaking members of the EU with that in the United States. Us-
ing data from the 2004 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, each team quickly
learned that all of the nations under study exhibited a rate of entrepreneur-
ial activity lagging behind that of the United States (Acs et al. 2004). Based
on these findings, each team was then asked to identify factors that inhib-
ited entrepreneurial activities and develop recommendations for ameliorat-
ing the identified barriers.
In two countries—Denmark and Germany—the student teams identified
the education system as major inhibitors of entrepreneurial initiative. In
Denmark, the issue revolved around the reinforcement throughout the ed-
ucation system of the national philosophy of collective good—janteloven. 1
Students are discouraged from deviating from a standard that suppresses
personal initiative, a central characteristic of entrepreneurial societies. To
the contrary, the curriculum in many, especially nonurban, Danish schools
appears to reinforce the status quo, a highly unionized workforce, and re-
liance on the central government for most goods and services.
In Germany, the defining issue was the early career tracking of German
students. Based on standardized testing, German students are placed in ca-
reer paths at an early age, often by the time they are 12 years old. The re-
mainder of their school experience is then tailored to ensure a high level of
technical competency within the assigned employment category. Rather
than encouraging students to explore the broadest range of career options
or professional opportunities, including starting their own businesses, the
career counseling function within the German education system often re-
stricts lateral thinking and focuses on competence rather than innovation.
The Danish and German experiences demonstrate how easily education
systems can encourage youth to drop out of an “entrepreneurial pipeline”
through which the student progresses from awareness to competence to ac-
tion. In the United States, elementary and secondary education represents
the weakest section of this pipeline. If students maintain interest in entre-
preneurship until their college years, they have access to an increasing num-
ber of colleges and universities with an entrepreneurship curriculum.
In 2004, Jerome Katz reported 1,600 schools of higher education in the
United States offering over 2,200 entrepreneurship courses, representing a
ten-fold increase from a decade earlier. Yet, experience shows that only a small
fraction of the approximately 50 million students currently enrolled in ele-
mentary and secondary schools remain in the pipeline long enough to take
advantage of this resource. Therefore, introducing students to the rewards, re-
quirements, and challenges associated with entrepreneurship prior to high