The Importance of Entrepreneurial Education and Its Impact
To me, it would be better to talk about the culture of entrepreneurship on the whole. Compared with many other countries, the USA and euro zone above all, it is still in an embryo stage. This could be best illustrated by figures describing the small and medium business sector contribution to the economy. The figure is 21 percent of the gross national product and the number of SME-employed people is in the area of 20 percent as well of the total able-bodied population. If we are to compare these figures with the USA, France, Germany, even China, we will see that SME is a key sector there, contributing about 60 percent to the overall economy of those countries and employing just as many people, three times more. So the figures speak for themselves. We do have a culture of entrepreneurship, and we do have progress in its development, but the development itself is regretfully still very slow. Other factors include methods of corporate governance and the general level of business transparency. A lot of entrepreneurs often try to get advantages for their businesses not by increasing the transparency of the business or improving the methods of running it but by finding the right official who will do something beneficial for the corporation and thus help it develop the business. This thinking and operating method needs to change.
Role of Education and Policy
The government policy is officially targeted against corruption. The psychology of people plays an important role as well. Strange as it may seem, I don't think it's a matter of repression, rather it's a matter of education. Teaching and learning can give people positive rather than negative examples to follow. One of Global Entrepreneurship Week events was dedicated to business transparency and its cost to the entrepreneur. For that event, we used what seemed to us a very good and positive example when we invited an entrepreneur to tell the story of his company. He had a network of supermarkets and realized the benefit of business transparency. He spent around $90,000 to make everything transparent and clear. The result was that he approached a U.S. private equity fund, which invested several million dollars in his company to ensure business growth. The entrepreneur himself got a profit of several million dollars. Positive examples like these are very useful. Entrepreneurship training for college, university, and business school professors is a key part of our activities, with programs such as Fasttrac and more.