A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure to be invited to participate in a think tank organized by the Young Canadians in Finance (YCIF). This year’s theme was focused on fostering entrepreneurship in Quebec.
The YCIF is a group of young professionals under 40 active in the private and public sectors with an interest in finance, economics, law and accounting. The weekend featured about 100 guests, including several current entrepreneurs, as well as speakers like ex-PM Jean Charest and investors Alexandre Taillefer and Nicolas Bélanger.
Key Themes
A consensus was quickly established among participants that Quebec needs more entrepreneurs. We then proceeded to identify 5 areas that could help foster a healthy entrepreneurship ecosystem in Quebec in the long run:
- Values and Culture (especially attitude towards failure)
- Investment & Capital Markets
- Education
- Tax & Fiscal Environment
- Mentoring
Asked to spend the remaining of the day exploring one of these themes in a small group, I chose the theme that I thought was most critical: education.
Educating the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs
Thus, our small group of 8 people focused on defining how our education system could contribute to inspire the next generation of students to pursue a path in entrepreneurship.
The idea would be to not only create more entrepreneurs, but to create better entrepreneurs. The idea would of course also be to help students better understand the reality of working in an entrepreneurial business or context, even without starting a business.
Our group was evenly divided in number between entrepreneurs and financiers.
We asked ourselves two key questions:
- What is the best time to intervene?
- What is the best form of intervention?
For the first question, we pondered if interventions would be more fruitful at the elementary, high school, CEGEP or university level. There was clear consensus in the group: high school.
High school is a great time to expose students to entrepreneurship, as they are just starting to think of their future career paths.
I founded my first startup while in high school at 16, so that answer definitely resonated with me. At the table was another tech entrepreneur, Antoine Azar from Mobilogie, who had also started a business at 16. Antoine transformed his interests for the web, 3D graphics and video games into a small business while still in school. While Antoine and I are perhaps outliers, I do believe that high school is the right moment to start the conversation with students about entrepreneurship.
For the second question, our group was very divided on what a possible intervention would look like. Many great suggestions were made from both entrepreneurs and financiers, such as introductory business classes, leadership seminars and mini-business plan contests.
Interestingly, the finance-background folks seemed to prefer activities that would ignite the desire to become an entrepreneur (ie. finding an idea), while the entrepreneurs seemed to prefer activities that would better train students to develop entrepreneurial skills (ie. communication, project management, etc).
I believe this is somewhat a reflexion of the background of the participants! Financiers seemed to think that identifying an idea that was worth taking a risk for was the “hard part”, while entrepreneurs who had big ideas already seemed to believe that developing the skills to execute those ideas was the hard part!
An Intervention Framework
In any case, what emerged was there perhaps was no “one size-fits all” form of intervention with students. Schools would likely need to offer various approaches to expose students to entrepreneurship based on their backgrounds, interests and skills.
To explore this idea, I proposed the following very basic framework:
In this matrix, the first thing to do is support/encourage/accelerate the students that possess both skills and passion. These students may have already demonstrated entrepreneurial potential and posses the qualities to become a leader. A combination of mentorship and funding should be made available to these students as soon as possible.
The Université of Montreal’s recently announced Startup Campus program aims to do just that for university students. The Founder Project and The Next 36 also aim to accelerate exceptional college entrepreneurs.
For the students who are passionate, creative and inspired, the challenge is to help them acquire the skills to develop their ideas. For the students who are naturally talented (ie. perhaps in math or other science-based disciplines), the challenge is to help inspire them to identify an idea or project they would be excited to start working on.
For those who have demonstrated neither passion nor skills, the challenge is to help them develop along one or both axii.
What’s interesting is to notice how the activities to foster entrepreneurship can vary considerably depending on whether one wants to train or inspire a student, as the previous table demonstrates.
Of course, this is a very crude intervention framework, but it illustrates that the answer to the challenge of fostering the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders may not be one-dimensional. In other words, I think that a single universal “Entrepreneurship” class is definitely a step in the right direction, but it may possibly not be a complete solution. Rather, the solution may lie in working with students on a more individual basis to see if entrepreneurship could be an interesting path for them based on their background.
A Way Forward For Quebec
Of course, education is not the only challenge Quebec faces as it works to foster a greater spirit of entrepreneurship.
In his keynote speech on Sunday, ex-Premier Jean Charest proposed the following action plan:
- Elevate the status of entrepreneurship as key component of the economy of Quebec.
- Develop an education system capable of promoting entrepreneurial qualities, notably through prizes, contests and projects.
- Support the growth and transfer of businesses, notably via succession planning, the international mobility of entrepreneurs and the increased access to investment.
- Optimize the administrative process and reduce hurdles faced by entrepreneurs to start and run their businesses.
- Support entrepreneurs via a healthy entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Charest commented that Quebec would prosper by partnering with foreign countries, especially in Asia, both to attract investment and position Quebec a key partner on a virtual “commerce route”.
Charest also added that Quebec has a distinct opportunity to position itself as leader in medical research on the world stage in the next 3 years with the launch in Montreal of our two new cutting edge university hospital research centres. This could lead to Quebec playing an increased role in medical or biotech entrepreneurship.
It would appear that our success at fostering entrepreneurship in Quebec will be multi-faceted.
In any case, the consensus from the think tank’s participants was that schools were a great place to start. Entrepreneurship education is critical and must start as soon as possible in the education system to help us foster the next generation of leaders and startups.
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