‘Entrepreneurship teaching must be dynamic to arouse interest’

Yes, I take my students out to interact with the world outside the campus and see how they can apply some of the entrepreneurship skills they have acquired in real life situations to benefit people in the real world. I think that AUN has done very well in this regard. The outings that we have had outside our campus and most of the ideas that our students came up with aren’t very different from what the students are actually doing in other universities. You know, you can predict how competition outside there could be; some institutional support that students in most of the Business schools have, it’s a lot advanced; they have diversity advantage; a lot of people attend universities from all continents in the UK and US. The 2014 winners, for instance, is a team of five people from five continents. One of them has a Master degree; he’s doing his second Master degree. The diversity is so much and the background is just great. That’s why I thought it was instructive to commence the playground project to boost innovation and creative skills in our campus; to provide some space where people can more actively engage in creative thinking and innovation. So, what we are trying to do is to make entrepreneurship a creative thinking and practical thing rather than something you just go and do. These instruments are very effective; they structure out creative thinking and practices so as to support people in innovation. There’s another one called ‘sing’. It helps people model a business idea. It is like a game people play; it is like a dice, you attach this, attach that, introduce this, introduce that; and that is how it can work out. The important of that is that you don’t forget to do something that is important. Instead of just one magic wand to stand in front of the board to tell people how to write a business plan, some of these instruments can help to introduce activity-based approaches of going about the process. Again, you need to make entrepreneurship learning very dynamic. So, these instruments can dynamise the way entrepreneurship is thought. You can’t just stand in front of people talking to them, you have to employ many techniques to make the subject real and arouse interest in the mind of your students.

This is a very good question. I have not carried out any research as to the reason why the mindset of many Nigerian university undergraduates is not changing with the introduction of entrepreneurship education curriculum. But I think honestly, there’s also the trouble with the nature of the training itself. I think that if people are taught entrepreneurship in a very exciting way, they would hopefully like it; they would hopefully have a passion for it and hopefully take to entrepreneurship when they graduate from school. I have students that I can tell you in the next two years when you find them wherever they are, you’ll see that they’ll be entrepreneurs as soon as they finish. You see, I have a diversity of ways I make students very excited about entrepreneurship. For instance, first of all, from their own point of view I ask them to assess their entrepreneurial skills; I have different instruments that we use to help people understand just how entrepreneurial and creative they are; their need for achievement, their need for autonomy and a host of other things. I think partly, it is the training. If people understand entrepreneurship as just business; maybe, they are not interested in doing business, so they will not get excited. But if it is presented to them as a powerful tool of changing the world; making the world different; creating wealth, of improving the lives of people, they would begin to reason in their minds that it could benefit them to choose that line. Even where am teaching, I take students to communities, I do a lot of work with communities and show students how to make a difference in other people’s lives and getting them to appreciate what we mean by entrepreneurship.

Well, I think on the general, there are many factors that are very counter-productive to business in Nigeria; and I think it is very important that stakeholders figure ways to make the environment more friendly, more open, and universities also have to play a very important role. I think one of the major reasons why it is not very attractive to do entrepreneurship is that the support available to people willing to be entrepreneurs isn’t enough and a host of things; there are microfinance institutions but people are not willing to take microfinance loans. I had an experience of taking a bank to a village and out of all the people in the village, none was willing to take a microfinance because the interest rate was 25 percent which was considered so high. I think we need to look at those factors. On the other hand, we need universities to do researches; that solves problems also. They should help students think entrepreneurially and help them also commercialise their researches. All these will combine to make entrepreneurship attractive to students.