Prof. Liora Katzenstein (ISEMI); Sam Burshtein (ISEMI)

This paper seeks to examine to what extent cultural and educational issues impact the practice of entrepreneurship. Are entrepreneurs in different cultures different or do they share certain key traits?  Is entrepreneurship an inborn trait or a skill that can be taught?
We argue that entrepreneurship is a form of creative expression, and as such – while building on the entrepreneurs innate character traits – is influenced it its application by different cultural bases amongst different populations issues and by educational background.

Some two hundred years ago, French economist J.B. Say described the entrepreneur as one who “…shifts economic resources out of an area of lower into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.”

More recently, Laurie Cox, the Chairman of the Australian Stock Exchange argued:

“Entrepreneurship is a combination of skills, talents, and timing.  It is not a static thing that can be measured but rather a dynamic and continuing process.  Entrepreneurship is quintessentially a process of innovation and initiation.  The quality of entrepreneurship embodies, among other things, alertness to new opportunities, the assembly and management of scarce resources, the adding of real value to new products, calculated risk taking (as opposed to gambling) and personal responsibility and involvement.”

If one agrees with these definitions, accepting the view of an entrepreneur as a “change agent”, who takes the lead in realigning economic and social relationships in a society, then one is forced to conclude that what differentiates entrepreneurs of different cultures is the nature of the resources they move, and the context in which “value” is measured and defined.

Thus, we can talk about entrepreneurship education as conveying a set of skills and perspectives that can, and in fact should, be transferred amongst cultures.  Much of entrepreneurship throughout history has in fact been the adaptation of a “foreign” cultural concept to a “domestic” environment.

As a personal example, our parent institution, ISEMI, the Israel School of Entrepreneurial Management and Innovation, the Israeli extension of Swinburne University of Technology, was formed by a group of entrepreneurship academics seeking to create a new educational paradigm to teach entrepreneurship in Israel and the region.  As experienced academics the principals embarked on a process of designing a program based on what they learned in decades of experience of teaching entrepreneurship.  Yet in the course of research they found – in Australia of all places – a program that exactly paralleled the principles they were trying to implement.

The program creators in Australia were also entrepreneurs, whose perspective aligned so closely with those of their compatriots half way around the world, and after a brief period of negotiations the two groups embarked on a partnership, and SUT’s program the basis of ISEMI’s academic offering.

The key elements that both parties felt an “entrepreneurship” program should encompass included a “hands-on”, practical orientation – “theory for practice’s sake” as the Australians refer to it, an emphasis on teamwork, a focus on identifying and evaluating opportunities and on launching new business venture and managing their growth.  Both also recognized the importance of an “integrated” structure”, built around projects in which students could apply their new skills.  It turned out that ISEMI and Swinburne had both, almost independently, based their program on the same principles.

Believing in the universality of the underlying principles, the Israeli team adopted the MEI program in its entirety.  On the level of the cultural overlay, ISEMI’s principals added a set of modules, covering topics such as what local financiers look for prior to extending funding, the local legal environment and the resulting constraints on behavior and entry barriers, availability of key resources (such as technically skilled employees), and the cultural definition of “success”.  Thus ISEMI graduates get both the Australian and the Israeli context in addition to the universal set of principles governing entrepreneurship.

It important to note that the expression of entrepreneurship depends on two interrelated issues – innate propensity to initiate change and the skills required act on that propensity.

Our experience is that propensity for entrepreneurship is inborn – though not overly rare. Many of those with the propensity are prevented from acting upon it by a lack of essential skills.  This is why entrepreneurship education has a high social return.

Societies that encourage entrepreneurship – such as the Jews, Americans, Dutch, have consistently shown themselves better able to adapt to changes and exploit opportunities presented by social and technological change.

Because the expression of entrepreneurship depends on a set of skills, we see great importance to encouraging entrepreneurship education at all levels.  One interesting initiative in this area is a project launched by the Branco-Wise Institute in conjunction with Israel’s Ministry of Education to introduce an entrepreneurship curriculum into the school system – even at the primary school level.

We believe strongly that entrepreneurship should be nurtured and encouraged at all levels and that public policy should work to lower the cultural barriers to its expression – be they excessive adherence to tradition, or fear of the disruptive effects of change.

Prof. Liora Katzenstein is the President and Founding Dean of ISEMI.  She holds a PhD in International Economics from the Graduate Institute of International Studies from the University of Geneva and a MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy was a visiting fellow at the Harvard Business School.  Dr Katzenstein has extensive commercial experience, as a consultant and executive, and is a board member of several public companies.

Sam Burshtein is a co-founder and Visiting Lecturer at ISEMI.  He is a graduate of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, and a B.Bus (with Distinction) from University of Technology, Sydney.  Mr Burshtein has broad business experience in Information Technology and as a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group.