It’s often tempting to think that entrepreneurs are born rather than made. After all, hugely successful people, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg famously didn’t finish college before building their hugely successful businesses.

Despite this, German research suggests that entrepreneurship is most definitely a skill that can be learned, with action-oriented training able to help us unlock the entrepreneurial potential within us.

While this suggests that the best approach is very much one of “learning by doing”, a second study from the University of Groningen found that classroom-based study is just as effective as experiential study.

Boosting entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship may be the most attractive option available for many given the intense economic uncertainty caused by the Covid pandemic.  At the height of the lockdown measures introduced around the world, the UN’s International Labour Organization stated that they believe 195 million jobs could be lost worldwide as a result of the pandemic. In the United States, the unemployment rate is at its highest since the Great Depression, with Andrew Yang stating recently that he expected many of those on furlough schemes to join them before the crisis has run its course.

This huge talent pool prompted Northeastern University’s J.D. LaRock to create a free course to help those people learn about starting a business.  The course aims to provide students with the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and is designed to be completed within a couple of weeks. The course covers market research, refining your business plan, funding a startup, and promoting your business.

“The global pandemic and the resulting employment crisis made me realize that we had something potentially quite impactful to offer people who were becoming unemployed,” says LaRock.

Support in a crisis

The situation is particularly dire in Brazil, which has been home to some of the worst recorded infection and death rates from Covid in the world.  This has had a correspondingly grave impact on the labor market.  Indeed, a paper published at the end of last year by the State University of Rio de Janeiro’s Institute for Social and Political Studies that employment in Brazil fell below 50% in June last year, with Black people and women particularly hard hit, due to their reliance on the informal sector and those considered non-essential respectively.

“The level of unemployment varied significantly between states,” the researchers say. “In some states, it exceeded 50%. When the social isolation measures were relaxed, it improved moderately, but it’s still well below the level seen before the pandemic.”

It’s a problem that Brazilian social enterprise Tamo Junto is tackling head on.  The organization, which was featured at MIT’s Virtual Solve event recently, aims to support the millions of entrepreneurs that operate in Brazil’s formal and informal economies.

Co-founder Luísa Bonin told me that the country has over 50 million entrepreneurs, but that for every entrepreneur operating in the formal market in the country, there are three operating in the informal market.  These entrepreneurs may not be the tech gods we associate with Silicon Valley, and often lack the skills to make the most of the limited opportunities they have, but they are nonetheless often the sole source of income for their family.  Indeed, there are nearly 9 million microentrepreneurs in the country who were unable to finish high school.

Tamo Junto provides them with a series of free, byte-sized video classes alongside an array of articles and tools to help them develop their entrepreneurial skills and make a better fist of the opportunities they have.  The content is specifically designed for this target market, and indeed is often delivered by fellow microentrepreneurs who have lived and breathed the same struggles.

Lasting change

During the pandemic, it is estimated that around 3 million Brazilians started a business, with the majority of these budding entrepreneurs falling into the low income and low education camp that often don’t even regard themselves as entrepreneurs at all.

Thus far, Tamo Junto have managed to support over 75,000 entrepreneurs via their courses, with a completion rate of 28% significantly higher than is commonly achieved by other online learning platforms.

Research from the University of Vaasa shows that once people receive entrepreneurship training, the skills and identity of an entrepreneur tend to last for their entire lifetime.

“Entrepreneurship would seem to lie deep in a person’s identity – even if an individual ends up in paid employment, the dream of entrepreneurship remains,” the researcher says. “Such longitudinal studies where the same persons are followed for nearly ten years are really rare in the field of entrepreneurship study.”

Tamo Junto are intervening at the very early stage of this process, and often need to forment the notion of oneself as an entrepreneur in the first place.  The early results certainly seem to suggest it’s an approach that’s working with around 60% seeing improvements in their living standards after completing the training.

Brazil as a country has been hit harder than many during the pandemic, with huge economic turmoil blighting the nation.  It’s perhaps fair to say that many of the millions of entrepreneurs are doing so out of desperation rather than any world changing ideas, but if they are to be successful in using their skills to provide for themselves and their families, then all the support they can get will be hugely valuable.