Entrepreneurship, Mentoring and Altruism

Abstract

In the recent years, numbers of researchers have questioned the wisdom of in class educational approach for entrepreneurship education. Proponents of taught pedagogy are increasingly faced with the dilemmas to understand and evaluate the end result either in the form of enterprise creation or application of the learnt knowledge in the real world phenomena. Students of entrepreneurship are guided to develop entrepreneurial traits through a learned process that involves acquiring insights, knowledge, skills and techniques. According to Virtanen (1997), traits and characteristics are intermediating variables that explain and predict entrepreneurial activity and behavior. Those who criticize the formal entrepreneurship education argue that the entrepreneurial traits cannot be developed during a formal academic program. Davenport and Prusak (1994) defined the business knowledge as “fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information and expert insight”. Further, there are many entrepreneurs who do not have any formal education in entrepreneurship. In a recent study, using the U.S. Department of Education’s Baccalaureate & Beyond (B&B) data series, Moutray (2008) found that business and management majors are either less likely to pursue self-employment or their entrepreneurial pursuit is not significantly different from other majors who would be starting a business. The current focus is to combine the theory with practical application and educate the learners in an informal manner. The 2001 Global Entrepreneurship (GEM) report raises some important concern on the quality of the entrepreneurship education, as it was difficult to transform ideas into viable businesses and proposes more involvement of successful entrepreneurs in mentoring. Parker (2004) suggested that, self-employed parents are more likely to offer informal induction of entrepreneurial knowledge compared to formal education. Mentoring is an important mechanism to bring desired entrepreneurial behaviors among the mentee or protege. Unfortunately there are no guiding theories to show how the core skills are transformed and incorporated into the proteges own life situations. This paper formulates a theoretical model to explain mentor protege relationship for entrepreneurship development. Based on the expected utility approach a theoretical model is constructed to analyze how the interaction between the mentor and protege would shape the mindset of the protege to be entrepreneurial. It is demonstrated that the mentoring is possible and could be an effective tool to promote entrepreneurship among the potential entrepreneurs, provided that a mentor is altruistic and willing to take part voluntarily.