A Master’s degree in Entrepreneurship: a good investment

Can entrepreneurship be taught? Entrepreneurship student Shruthi Hosur gives her opinion, and provides an insight into the MSc Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technology offered by the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship.

There has been much debate over recent years as to whether entrepreneurship can be ‘taught’ - at the same time universities across the world are offering courses in Entrepreneurship. Granted, Entrepreneurship cannot be taught in a traditional manner and the course itself needs to be entrepreneurial in nature. The challenge for every university is: How should the curriculum be structured to equip students to be successful entrepreneurs?

The Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde is relentlessly striving to create not just the ‘right curriculum’ but the ‘right environment for entrepreneurship to thrive’.

As a person who was looking for opportunities to educate myself in the nuances of Entrepreneurship, I seem to have landed in the right place.

After carefully weighing all the pros and cons and taking into consideration the investment I would be making in terms of time, effort and money, I started my MSc in Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology in September 2016.

So why did I choose to ‘study’ a course instead of investing time and effort into becoming an Entrepreneur?

The answer is entrepreneurship is a big, big risk. The failure rates are astoundingly high. It’s a cold, hard fact. Success in the field greatly depends on being in the right place, at the right time, and doing the right thing, all of which requires some amount of guidance and the environment to cultivate the right mind set to ‘be’ an entrepreneur.

Competition is intense: there are so many start-ups being launched every single day around the world, you have to be at the top of your game and have access to the right networks and investors. For some people, the start-up they believed would change the world will not even see the light of the day. There is fierce competition for space, attention, money and market share.

A degree in Entrepreneurship prepares you: you are subjected to intensive training to develop the right mind set and discipline to be successful while also teaching you to face the inevitable failures and losses.

The Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship has a clear agenda for this Masters programme and the excitement about the course was palpable on the induction day, both among the faculty members and students.

My very first class, Creativity and Innovation Development, opened my eyes to a new world of opportunities and avenues. We were introduced to the new technologies and trends in Entrepreneurship, on which we should ideally be spending our energy on.

During our first semester, we had an extremely interesting workshop conducted by Snook, a design firm. The three-day intensive workshop on design thinking radically changed our mind-set. It was an experience of ‘unlearning’ many existing, redundant methods of thinking. The hands-on class was enlightening in the sense that ‘an idea’ has to be subjected to a good deal of testing just to assess if it’s valuable!

It was an extremely insightful session and most importantly taught us the value of adopting the approach of design thinking. This module complemented the Creativity and Innovation development module and eventually helped us to develop and pitch ideas based on the methods and input received during the workshop.

The Hunter Centre also collaborated with the Department of Management Science to teach us the importance of learning the nuances of Data Science and how it can impact the development and understanding of our own businesses.

We have also been challenged to learn Accounting and Financial Analysis, knowledge of which is an important asset for an entrepreneur. This was a valuable class considering more than half of us are from non-accounting backgrounds and had to assimilate advanced levels of accounting and financial methods.

The whole course is pushing us into a lot of unknown territories - essentially what an entrepreneur would experience while building his or her dream company. Coping with new challenges and pushing our limits formed the crux of our learning in semester one. On top of that, being in a class with people all over the world, with increasingly different academic and professional backgrounds and a huge range of experiences, expanded our boundaries: intellectual, cultural and emotional.

The atmosphere at the university helps you to indulge in entrepreneurial activities through several initiatives, competitions, conferences and training programmes aimed at entrepreneurship. There are regular networking sessions to meet entrepreneurs, industry experts and top academicians. The University also has links with various external organisations and government bodies that supports and funds entrepreneurs.

In addition to this, the University has a dedicated Enterprise Hub and an Entrepreneurial Network to provide the required legal guidance, mentorship, infrastructure and financial support to launch your own venture. There are more facilities and resources at our disposal than we can possibly use. I do not know if a university can get any more entrepreneur-friendly than this!

I am looking forward to new challenges in the next semester. To anyone wondering whether a degree in Entrepreneurship is worthwhile, as a student of Entrepreneurship, it’s an overwhelming ‘yes’ from me.

About Shruthi Hosur

Shruthi Hosur is a postgraduate student on the MSc Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology programme.