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The best education for an entrepreneur is experience. Academic education is a valuable tool, and certainly degrees in engineering are great for teaching problem solving skills and stimulating innovations, but nothing replaces lessons that can be learned through trial and error. The classroom for trial and error is life itself, suggesting a specific course of study would constrain and limit the spirit of entrepreneurialism.

To be an entrepreneur there first has to be the desire and then a vision and will to act upon it. An entrepreneur cannot fear failure if success is desired. One could spend hours in classes and learn ways to minimize failures or learn ways of recovering quickly from them, but a true entrepreneur will find learning by traditional means as a frustrating experience.

An entrepreneur will have the desire and drive to just roll up the sleeves and get started quickly. He or she may fail miserably, but will be the type of person that will learn from that mistake and get up and try something different. Academia won't have value to this type of person until a few failures have indicated what key items they need more guidance on so a more focused education can be sought after.

Not everyone starts out as an entrepreneur. Some may go the traditional route of pursuing a degree and in the process the person learns something that triggers the entrepreneur inside. This can often happen in the creative fields of art and engineering. Engineering is not typically considered a creative field, rather a science, but the good engineers are typically the creative ones. The math and physics just provides a way of expressing that creativity.

Not all engineers turn out this way, however, as is apparent with some of the larger corporations that have patent after patent of great products sitting on paper but not in the market because the engineers were purely engineers. Consider the graphical user interface developed by Xerox. A great innovation from creative thinking engineers and problem solvers, but no one knew what to do with it until Steve Jobs, a pure entrepreneur, cross paths with it, and turned it into the Macintosh.

The Macintosh came with failures, and Apple struggled throughout the years for various reasons. The drive continued because of the entrepreneurial spirit and ultimately Apple has become respected in the industry again today with OSX, iTunes, and the iPhone. It was not academic pursuit that made it happen. Just as Bill Gates became an entrepreneur before finishing his college degree.

If the goal is to be an entrepreneur, follow the dreams within. Those will direct a path where lessons will be learned through trial and error. The experiences gained will then determine the specific education that is best for that specific entrepreneur, as there is no one right curricula to perfect an entrepreneur since we all start with different strengths and weaknesses.

Learn more about this author, David Kramer.
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