Entrepreneurial Center's blog

Inherited or learned? Some studies show that the young people most likely to start and successfully run their own businesses are those whose parents own a business. Pretty obvious, really, given that they’ve grown up in a house where being an entrepreneur is a given rather than a dream.

But what about those who yearn to be entrepreneurs but aren’t children of business owners? We know we can teach them the skills and behaviors of successful entrepreneurs. The question is whether you can give them the passion.

Bill Gates isn’t an accident or a force of nature. Warren Buffett wasn’t spouting investment advice as a toddler. Oprah wasn’t handed a media empire on a silver platter.

What these entrepreneurs – and so many others – have in common is that they are incredibly bright, relentlessly driven individuals who created their own success, one step at a time. They recognize opportunities. They fail sometimes; and they learn from those failures. They focus on their goals with single-minded determination.

They’re young, enthusiastic and wickedly successful. And they’ll be at Iowa Western Community College on March 27 to show that dreaming big pays off – big.

Do you ever wonder where all those big ideas come from? Who dreams up new ways to use the Internet? Whose ideas become products we can’t live without? And how do the dreamers turn their ideas into reality?

If the age-old question is whether the chicken or egg came first, the new-age question for educators might be whether entrepreneurial education stands on its own or is integrated into career curricula. The traditional model is to house entrepreneurship in the business department, and there certainly is a strong case to be made for that connection.