Message for high schools: focus on SMEs please
A Massey academic criticises high school teachers for failing to make the link for students between creativity, innovation and the idea of running their own business.
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A Massey academic has criticised high school teachers for failing to make the link for students between creativity, innovation and the idea of running their own business.
Dr Andrew Cardow, a senior lecturer at Massey University’s School of Management, and an experienced business owner, was speaking in Auckland recently at the Small Business Summit organised by Small Business Voice.
Cardow said the New Zealand Government needs to promote in our high schools the idea of working in the SME sector.
“The government needs to start creating the idea of small business being a creative exercise right from high school,” he said. “At the moment, if you show any kind of academic ability you are steered away from business and into the STEM courses [science, technology, engineering and mathematics].”
While STEM courses are positive in their own right, he said, the students who focus on them generally end up working for someone else.
Cardow also criticised secondary educators for teaching irrelevant and outdated business skills.
“Business education in high schools hasn’t changed much in 30 years,” he said. “It’s still about profit and loss, balance sheets and business plans rather than looking at creative and innovative ideas.”
He added that since 2007, in the academic literature at least, formal business plans have been proven to be “a complete waste of time”.
Instead, he said, it would be better for high school students to learn about strategy, marketing planning and how to identify and work with niche customers.
By Ruth Le Pla. Email [email protected]
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business education in schools
Andrew is alarmingly wrong with his claim that business education hasnt changed much in 30 years, suggesting that either he is out of touch, or he hasnt looked at schools for the last thirty years – or is that the same thing.
In the years 2011 – 2012 a new subject called Business Studies was introduced to NCEA run through most NZ secondary schools. Prior to this ( ie last thirty years) the academic offering was only economics and accounting, or the more experiential Young Enterprise Scheme.
It is fair to say that the nCEA Busines Studies course wass influenced by the Cambridge International Examinations and International Baacalaureate programs both of which had a dedicated business subject and both of which had been intorduced to NZ within the last thirty years.
In my research on R&D funding for innovation within the HVMS sector in NZ, one of the factors that has been cited as an indicator of future innovative success is sound financial management so I think the understanding of cashflow, profit and loss remain valuable learnings, and usefully taught at school.
I also think that the useful understanding of strategy and any operational plans arising from it, have to be translated back into business tools that banks, and the government are able to use. To date this is the business plan.
I agree with Andrews statement about the worth of business plans according to the academic literature, but this may, or may not be a fashion, as was the fascination of economics with quantification in the 1980s.