by Rupert Merson, Adjunct Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
George Davies (Adjunct Lecturer, and General Partner at Four Cities Capital) and I have just finalised the grading for LBS’s Entrepreneurship Summer School (ESS) with the usual flurry of excitement from those who worry about such things and the silent indifference of those who don’t. But, in truth, ESS is probably the LBS course on which students worry the least about their grades.
It’s not that ESS participants don’t care about their grades – it’s that other programme outputs, just for once, matter more. Participants don’t take ESS solely for academic reasons, though the academic content of the programme is as rich and challenging as that of any other LBS elective. Participants apply to ESS because they have a commitment to a specific entrepreneurial opportunity and want to test it.
The purpose of ESS is to provide participants with a robust methodology for evaluating an opportunity which superficially seems attractive – and to reach a conclusion as to whether or not the opportunity is worth pursuing for sure. The conclusions that participants reach about their own ideas that matter far more than their grades. Indeed, every year ESS welcomes a minority of its participants from outside the school as ‘externals’, and they don’t care about their grades at all!
Too many would-be business school entrepreneurs rely on too many untested assumptions and take too much for granted when setting up their own businesses, choosing to rely on native intelligence, learning and a capacity for hard work. In recent years, thinkers in the field have encouraged entrepreneurs to shorten the time from ideation to initiation, which hasn’t helped either. Entrepreneurs have often caught the wrong end of a sensible stick, and used, for example, notions such as business model canvas or MVP as unjustified and misinterpreted excuses for by-passing robust analysis and research. ESS requires participants to take a step back before leaping forwards, thus giving themselves a better chance of taking advantage of their undoubted capabilities and advantages. The ESS methodology helps participants identify and then evaluate thoroughly their assumptions.
By the end of the programme in September, when all participants are required to present their conclusions to an expert panel, the initial ideas will have either been validated – often following several iterations and pivots – or rejected. Participants will also have reached a conclusion as to whether they wish to take the idea forward themselves, in full knowledge of the commitment demanded by and the risks associated with entrepreneurship in general and their proposition in particular.
In addition to class-room work in July and August of each year, participants are allocated expert mentors to work with them and provide support as they conduct their research and analysis. Support also, of course, comes from each other. For each of the last few years, an ESS class WhatsApp group has provided lively sharing and challenge across the cohort – both during the programme itself and long after it has finished. And then there are the LBS faculty, of course, pulling the strings. I myself, as an adjunct professor and long-time adviser to an entrepreneurial growing business, have led this year’s iteration with venture capitalist George Davies. Alongside our students and mentors, we’re conscious of giving up our summers to the cause, but we’re both aware of being just the latest in a line of LBS faculty members who have been involved in the programme since it was initiated more than 20 years ago, including John Bates and John Mullins and most recently Jeff Skinner. For all of us, leading ESS has been a pleasure and a privilege.
Assessing the success of anything associated with entrepreneurship is always problematic. ‘What is success?’ is just as difficult a question to answer as ‘What is truth?’ Every year, graduates of ESS find their way onto the LBS incubator, or use other LBS courses, electives and the vast range of experiential initiatives available as part of LBS’ £2m Entrepreneurship Experience to develop their thinking further. And those who choose, as a consequence of ESS not to take their ideas further are considered just as much successes as the many graduates of the programme who come back to tell new classes about their progress. One of the objectives of the programme is to help participants reject propositions that superficially seem compelling, thus saving a lot of otherwise wasted time and energy. This type of success rarely finds its way into assessments of the success of entrepreneurship education, but, given the risks associated with new venture development, perhaps it is the most important.