How to School the Aspiring Entrepreneur

Training would-be entrepreneurs is a little like striking a match. For a brief moment, there’s plenty of heat and light: participants leave sessions energized, brimming with startup ideas and eager to see them through. But, too often, the tinder fails to catch and the flame quickly goes out. Weeks later, lessons are forgotten and enthusiasm is nowhere to be seen. 

A new study offers a better pathway to entrepreneurship education, but it involves a change in perspective. The most effective approach, it suggests, may be less about igniting enthusiasm and more about giving the flame something to burn into the night. It involves getting aspiring entrepreneurs to immediately apply their new skills and knowledge via business actions, learning from what happens and using that experience to fuel their next move.  

Researchers tracked university students who took part in an action-oriented entrepreneurship program, checking in with them a full year after the program ended. They discovered training that gets people to act — not just want to act — kicks off a self-sustaining cycle involving motivation and behaviour. That cycle, not the training program itself, is what determines whether someone is still chasing a business idea a year later, and whether their startup is a reality.

Leaky pipeline

The research addresses a problem that bedevils most forms of professional development: training effects tend to fade. People acquire skills and knowledge in lectures and case studies and return to their jobs motivated, only to discover that the demands of everyday work make it difficult to apply what they’ve learned.

According to the standard model of training transfer, the factors that determine whether program learnings survive contact with reality are set well before the program even starts: factors such as who you are, how the training was designed and the nature of workplace culture. Once training ends, the model has little to say about what happens next.

That gap is what the research team — Matthias Spitzmuller of Smith School of Business, Michael Gielnik and Fokko Eller of Leuphana University Lüneburg, and Carina Bohlayer of Doorways gGmbH, a German non-government organization — set out to fill. They point to a growing body of research suggesting that training effectiveness is not fixed at the moment of delivery but dynamic. What trainees do in the weeks and months afterward can make their motivation grow or wither, regardless of the quality of the original session.

The researchers believed that taking early business-related action could be the antidote to the training transfer problem, particularly for aspiring entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, after all, operate in conditions of uncertainty. They don’t necessarily know whether the opportunity they have identified is viable, whether customers will buy their product, or if their business model is scalable. Action, therefore, produces information that can’t be obtained simply by studying entrepreneurship. Action also produces results and, in time, a sense of progress and mastery. That, in turn, can strengthen the person’s belief that entrepreneurship is feasible and worth pursuing.

A learning flywheel of intentions, actions and motivation

The researchers conducted longitudinal field studies in Mexico and South Africa to test whether this dynamic would play out in real life. In Mexico, 413 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to a 12-week entrepreneurship program or a control group. The program involved three-hour sessions each week, during which participants learned business fundamentals and developed a micro-business idea, acquiring resources and selling their product or service to real customers.

The researchers measured participants three times: before the program, shortly afterward, and one year later. The South African study followed essentially the same design, involving 252 students at a public university.

The researchers’ two studies showed how the learning dynamic played out. In both Mexico and South Africa, the training program produced short-term increases in entrepreneurial intentions and actions, such as researching a market, sourcing equipment or approaching potential customers. As with most training, these gains started to fade. Plotted over time, both goal intentions and entrepreneurial action traced an inverted U: a spike right after training, then decline. That’s the standard story of skill decay, but, in this case, not the whole story.

The researchers found that participants who initiated more entrepreneurial actions right after training were significantly more likely to have strong entrepreneurial goal intentions a year later. As the researchers predicted, intentions drove actions, and actions reinforced intentions. Each round of doing something — pitching an idea, testing a product, closing a sale — generated feedback and a sense of competence that fed back into stronger motivation, which fed the next round of action. Trainees who ended up owning a business a year later got there largely through this reinforcing loop, not through the initial training bump alone.

The process is significant because starting a business rarely happens in a single burst of motivation. It takes sustained activity, often over months or years, and entrepreneurs encounter setbacks that can prompt them to abandon their plans.

The researchers also wanted to know what determines when the learning loop takes hold. They found that the reciprocal relationship between intentions and actions was stronger when participants’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness were more fulfilled. In practical terms, people were more likely to sustain the cycle when they felt they had some ownership over their actions, were capable of improving, or were supported by others. In the South African study, the reciprocal relationship between intentions and actions was significantly stronger among participants with higher need fulfillment; among those with lower need fulfillment, the learning loop barely engaged at all.

“This suggests that entrepreneurship training must not only focus on training content and motivation, but also connect aspiring entrepreneurs to basic needs that are foundational for post-training activity and success,” says Spitzmuller.

The lonely world of the entrepreneur

The study is a useful reminder that not all learning and development obeys the same rules. In some ways, entrepreneurship training is like conventional professional development: both aim to change what people know, believe and do. Both are vulnerable to the dreaded curve of decay once the workshop ends. In both domains, active learning outperforms passive instruction — a lesson corporate learning-and-development teams have increasingly absorbed.

Yet entrepreneurship training has a distinguishing feature: there’s no organization on the other end to sustain it. A salesperson who returns from negotiation training walks back into a job with a manager, colleagues and deadlines. More often than not, an aspiring entrepreneur returns to nothing but their own initiative. There’s no supervisor assigning the next task, no performance review enforcing follow-through.

That’s why the learning loop between motivation and action matters more to aspiring entrepreneurs. In the absence of an external structure demanding continued effort, the individual has to generate their own momentum, rejection after rejection, sale by sale.

“This makes basic need satisfaction even more important,” says Spitzmuller. “You have no one else to hold you accountable or support with training transfer. But it also presents an opportunity. You can craft your job in a way that makes sure your learning sticks.”