The Master of Science (MSc) programs at TBS Education are designed to equip students with all the necessary skills to become experts in their field and position themselves as key assets in the job market.
The school offers 17 MSc programs, all recognized by the French government and awarding a Master’s degree. This diploma is not only recognized in France but also internationally, thanks to the school’s triple accreditation.
In addition to top-tier academic training, TBS Education promotes an immersive learning approach, allowing students to gain real-world professional experience.
This is exemplified by the MSc Aerospace Management, offered at the Toulouse campus, which participated in a 21-week project titled Cross Masters Air Travel Project.
This project focused on the theme: “Towards More Sustainable Tourism”, with a particular emphasis on enhancing Toulouse’s tourism appeal through the involvement of the region’s major airports: Toulouse-Blagnac Airport and Toulouse Francazal Airport.
In collaboration with these airport infrastructures and the University of Toulouse, 37 students from 18 different nationalities worked together to develop innovative and feasible recommendations. Topics covered included:
Students applied various research methodologies (site visits, qualitative and quantitative surveys, interviews, documentary research, etc.) to propose concrete and innovative solutions.
This project allowed them to address a real and relevant issue while developing their skills and professional networks.
In Barcelona, students from the MSc Digital Transformation & Business Innovation conducted a consulting mission for Noè Builders, a subsidiary of the Coco-Mat group, specializing in sustainable wooden house and hotel architecture and construction.
The goal was to perform a market analysis, assessing competition and proposing strategic recommendations to support the company’s market growth.
This two-week mission enabled students to:
They were mentored by Xavier Gasso, a university professor, and Júlia Farré Fernández, a professor and consultant in strategic and business development.
These two projects illustrate TBS Education’s commitment to training its students not only on the academic level but also on the professional level, equipping them with all the tools they need to stand out in the job market.
Congratulations to all teams and students for the successful completion of these ambitious projects!
The sports sector is experiencing a significant boom. The sector has been topping the news with physical activity and sport being named France’s Great National Cause 2024 (GCN2024). This initiative reflects the need to place sport and its benefits at the heart of society as essential elements of individual and collective well-being.
With this in mind, TBS Education’s Bachelor’s degree program has announced the opening of a new 3rd-year sports management program on the Toulouse campus. Designed to respond to the needs of the market, the Sports Management program is designed to introduce students to a range of professions linked to sports management, open up the sector’s possibilities, help them build a network and enable them to work in a sector they are passionate about.
“Sport has the ability to unite, bring people together, nurture their dreams and inspire them… By drawing on its values, its social impact and its power, we will be offering students the chance to immerse themselves in the world of sport by meeting professionals from the sector, learning the fundamentals of management through innovative and inspiring experiences, visits and role-playing,” explains Alexandra Le Mouel, Head of the Sports Management program.
Enhance student skills in the 3rd year and obtain a Bachelor’s degree in Management (Diploma Bac+3 / Grade de licence) with a specialization in sports management.
“We have chosen to launch a new sports management program to respond to the needs of this booming sector. As in all our courses, the program will be based on the acquisition of a solid knowledge base and real-life, immersive experiences. Using a teaching approach directly inspired by the world of sport, the keys to its success and its fundamental values, students will be fully immersed in this environment which prepares them to become enlightened experts, aware of the challenges facing the sector,” explains Patricia Bournet, Director of the Bachelor’s program at TBS Education.
Following the Bachelor’s degree, students can choose to continue their studies at a Grande Ecole, including TBS Education, or at a university in France or abroad.
This program will be available on the Toulouse campus, in French, in September 2024.
To apply, students must be under 28 years of age on September 1, 2024, and hold, or be likely to hold, a B+2 diploma or 120 ECTS in Management Studies at a French university.
Students studying outside France are eligible for the international distance-learning competitive entrance exam.
Application deadline: May 31, 2024
40 places available for Bachelor students and students recruited through parallel admission.
As COVID-19 has spread across the world it has had major impacts on supply chains. It is reasonable to assume that the impact on trade flows may be even greater than that for the GFC in 2009, where world trade fell by over 20%. Most of this is an entirely natural result of the closure of many production structures around the world. However, some trade impacts are the direct result of trade policy interventions by governments, which presage a more major and long-term impact from the current crisis. Discover more in the video below:
[Série – Face à la crise Covid-19] How will Covid-19 impact international trade policies ? from FNEGE MEDIAS on Vimeo.
Consumers in Western markets are increasingly critical towards globalization and re-embrace local values. Companies thus must decide whether to continue to pursue global branding strategies and/or rejuvenate local branding strategies. To explore the implications of market globalization for consumer preferences, we use signaling theory to investigate the role of perceived brand globalness and localness as signals of brand credibility, related downstream effects and boundary conditions, across two countries with differing levels of globalization. In globalized markets, brand globalness is a weaker signal of brand credibility than brand localness, whereas in globalizing markets, the two signals are of equal importance.
Building Credible Brands in (Post-)Globalizing Markets from FNEGE MEDIAS on Vimeo.
By Christina Theodoraki
Based on the article “A social capital approach to the development of sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems: an explorative study” published in Small Business Economics, 51(1), 153-170.
The creation of sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems is at the heart of public policy concerns. This type of ecosystem is composed of interconnected actors, within a territory, committed to facilitating the creation of new sustainable businesses. In this context, many questions need to be asked: Is it possible to replicate Silicon Valley’s success? Should governments continue to ‘infuse’ the ecosystem eternally with financial endowments or can the ecosystem reach a maturity threshold that allowed it to self-finance itself to evolve? What action plan must be considered to reach this maturity threshold? The social capital perspective is an interesting integrative framework that deserves to be analyzed to answer these questions.
The evolution of the entrepreneurial environment reinforces these questions. The economic crisis, the decline in public funding, the increase in the number of actors who revolve around the entrepreneur, competition between public, semi-public and private actors, the emergence of new entrants are new factors that threaten the survival of existing actors and force them to review their economic model or their contribution to the proper functioning of the ecosystem.
Thus, the university is one of the historical and founding actors of entrepreneurial ecosystems. The contribution of universities to the sustainability of the entrepreneurial ecosystem is important. They contribute to the creation of knowledge that they transfer to students in order to prepare them to integrate the entrepreneurial ecosystem. In parallel, the establishment of academic incubators promotes technology transfer, commercialization and value creation through the creation of spin-offs and young innovative companies. These incubators are intermediate actors who build the bridge between the supported companies and their external environment. Their objective is “to act as a neutral coordinator to promote the interests of academic entrepreneurs, remove barriers to their success, and connect them to entrepreneurship support mechanisms both inside and outside the university” (Hayter 2016, p. 651-652).
However, even if the role and contribution of some actors in the ecosystem seems obvious, current research fails to explain why some ecosystems are more “sustainable” than others. The synthesis of studies in this field distinguishes three characteristics to promote a sustainable ecosystem: (i) the consideration of territorial specificities; (ii) the effect of a supportive entrepreneurial culture; and (iii) the continuous interaction and interdependence of its components. The social capital perspective represents the configuration of a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Social capital is composed of tangible and intangible elements grouped into three dimensions: the structural one, the cognitive one and the relational one (see figure 1). The structural dimension describes the properties of the ecosystem (the number of ties between members, the configuration of these ties and their stability); the cognitive dimension refers to the shared culture within the ecosystem (shared goals and language, shared narratives); the relational dimension refers to the behavior of members (the norms to be respected, the members’ obligations, the identification of each member – who does what -, and the trust they build between them). Combining these dimensions promotes the optimal configuration of the ecosystem and contributes to its sustainability.
We can therefore assume that if we have devoted resources to structuring the ecosystem, creating a shared culture and languages, and fostering stakeholder relationships with norms and obligations of members, our ecosystem will be sustainable. Unfortunately, it is not enough to only build the structural, cognitive and relational dimensions of the ecosystem. These dimensions are interconnected, and their interactions promote the adaptation of the ecosystem to the specificities of each territory and each ecosystem.
The key ingredient for the well-functioning of the ecosystem is to consider the interactions of its dimensions. It is important to build bridges between these dimensions to promote exchanges and the interconnectivity of the elements. It is this interconnectivity that is the key to the success of a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Figure 1: The Social Capital Perspective of the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
This study provides a better understanding of the composition of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and proposes a framework (through the social capital perspective) for configuring a sustainable ecosystem. Despite the focus of this study on academic incubators, our results are applicable in different sectors and contexts. In order to build a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem, it is advisable to: 1) create dense and strong relationships between members to compensate for the scarcity of resources; 2) develop a common culture and values within the ecosystem to ensure solidarity among members; 3) develop trust and rules respected by members to strengthen a climate of security conducive to value co-construction; 4) create bridges between mechanisms to fluidize and make flexible the evolution of the ecosystem.
The qualitative method using multiple case studies was conducted in Montpellier between 2013 and 2014 on 3 academic incubators. The choice of these incubators met four selection criteria: (i) proximity and commitment to an academic university, (ii) access to university services, (iii) transfer of scientific knowledge and support for the creation of new innovative businesses, (iv) geographical area. In total, we conducted 48 semi-directive interviews with all members of the entrepreneurial ecosystem (incubator managers, staff, incubatees, academic partners, funding entities, other types of incubators, etc.). This collection of ecosystem data with various groups of stakeholders allowed us to have a holistic view of the observed phenomenon, to cross-reference different points of view and to generate results by triangulation. The interviews were conducted using an interview guide, recorded, transcribed and coded to provide a synthesis of the results.Co-authored by Christina Theodoraki (Professor, TBS Education), Karim Messeghem (Professor, University of Montpellier, co-director of the Jacques Cœur Chair at Labex Entreprendre), and Marc P. Rice (Provost at Babson College).
By Lambert Jerman and Evelyne Misiaszek
Successful companies like Sigfox, BricoPrivé or Hellocasa all belong to the world of scale-ups. Whether these companies are young or old, their hypergrowth phase is a highly critical period.
These days, the idea of « scale-up » includes businesses with an annual turnover greater than €5m, with growth of at least 10 to 20% over three years. After graduating from being a start-up and having validated its business model, the scale-up must transform rapidly on several levels : internationalization, recruitment, new business, technical or financial partnerships. Its internal piloting system must keep evolving so that the company can face new challenges, while at the same time the director has to ensure that any new management tools put in place are adapted for hypergrowth. It’s a situation that requires a delicate balance between short-term decisions and the company’s long-term strategy.
A loss of proximity and a delicate balance to be achieved
Recruitment needs being, by definition, substantial in companies in hypergrowth, employee numbers are inclined to increase so quickly that before long the director finds him or herself unable to directly supervise the workforce or get to know them personally. This loss of hierarchical proximity is often exacerbated by an ever greater geographical distancing. Information flow can be threatened within that structure, and jeopardise the business’s culture and cohesion. The director’s charisma, values and personal commitment are no longer enough.
To get to grips with this new reality, the director of a scale-up has to adapt and reinforce the way the company is governed and strengthen its piloting system, without curbing the creativity and innovation so vital so its development.
Achieving this delicate balance in a way that maintains responsiveness and the informal coordination inherited from the start-up alongside more formal and rationally-defined procedures necessary to a larger group, is anything but easy. Four drivers of action can nonetheless be identified to make transforming the company less complex, and to maintain as far as possible the proximity necessary for it to remain cohesive.
To tackle the two major risks associated with piloting hypergrowth – a more complex business environment and the loss of proximity to its teams – the director of a scale-up needs to let the company find a balance between the very informal piloting system of a start-up and the more formal control of the big groups.
This article has been written under the partnership “Scale UP – Gérer l’hypercroissance”
Ingrid Molderez and Kim Ceulemans
Will our future business managers be able to tackle sustainability challenges? Can art contribute to acquiring sustainability competencies in management education? Our study explored the power of art to foster systems thinking, one of the key competencies of sustainability, and to help business students think more creatively about divergent views on sustainability.
Thirty years after the Brundtland Commission popularized the concept of sustainable development, the issue has become more urgent than ever. Global challenges such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, poverty and migration are omnipresent and are affecting everybody in spite of place and time. There are no easy or instant solutions, but education plays an important role in raising awareness on sustainability and in how to respond to these challenges.
Paul Shrivastava, an influential management and sustainability scholar, argues that education for sustainability requires more than just cognitive understanding. We need alternative ways of teaching that incorporate physical and emotional engagement (Shrivastava, 2010). However, pedagogical approaches that combine head, heart and hand are rare in management education. Management students are used to studying topics that immediately impact the knowledge and skills that they will need in a business context. Spiritual and/or creative ways of teaching are nearly absent. Yet, this is what we focused on in our research. We used art as a pedagogical way to enrich the whole person, to encourage critical and creative thinking around sustainability and we explored how management students react to this.
The concept of sustainability brings the importance of interconnections between human beings and nature back to the surface. The boundaries that have been created as splitting forces between humans and their environment have to be perceived as binding again, so that we can see ourselves again as functioning in togetherness. Changing towards sustainability generates intense emotions and at the same time, intense emotions are needed to be able to make a change towards sustainability. Art generates and encourages emotions, triggers our criticism and challenges our comfort. In relation to systems thinking and sustainability, art can help us to regain focus on the connections and interdependences of our systems.
In our study, we exposed management students to paintings during their Master’s level corporate social responsibility course. We did not especially focus on artists that use their art to criticise the negative environmental impacts human beings have. We opted for painters who are not known for their ecological engagement, but whose artwork makes us reflect upon the role human beings have in society. René Magritte’s painting Les Jours Gigantesques was a source of inspiration and reflection to help them think about and discuss boundaries as connecting and disconnecting forces in a sustainability context.
After class, we surveyed the participating students to study their receptiveness towards art in a management course. We explored whether they found art relevant to study three aspects of systems thinking, i.e., the system/environment relationship, thinking in patterns and relationships, and understanding the interactions between system and environment. For each of these aspects, the majority of the surveyed students agreed that art can be very relevant to discuss such issues. The students noted that using art was helpful for showing different points of view, that it facilitated understanding the topic from another perspective, and that it helped them to see the importance of connections within sustainability.
In this study, the majority of the students were receptive for using art because it acts as an eye opener and makes them think differently about sustainability. Nevertheless, some students were also very critical, because they had a fixed idea about art, i.e. only being relevant for an exhibition about sustainability rather than in a more abstract way to understand or discuss sustainability. They thought that showing pictures about what is really happening in the world would be more effective. However, it has to be underlined that art cannot be used in a functional way, as this goes counter to the core concepts of what art is about. Hence, we were not looking for a causal relationship between using art and effectively learning about sustainability, but we intended to explore ways to connect head, hand and heart in management education.
What can we learn from this research?
While management education is known for its functionalist approach, we should remember that business students can be receptive to alternative learning methods. Using paintings can be a relevant method for explaining sustainability topics, encouraging critical thinking, and adopting a holistic approach by triggering their creativity. Art can help students to think critically about sustainability concepts addressed in class, and shows them that there is space for different approaches and interpretations of such complex concepts.
Higher education has an important role to play in sensitising students towards sustainable development, and in helping them to develop competencies for addressing sustainability issues. Art and artists have a gift to make people think in a critical way, to go beyond boundaries, to initiate emotions which are all very relevant if we want to change our mindset on a topic (such as sustainability). Higher education could consider no longer reserving art for students in art-related disciplines, but to surpass the strict boundaries between disciplines. Art can be inspirational for every discipline and is worthy of a place in every study programme, including disciplines that are perceived as less receptive, such as management, engineering, law among many others.
This article was originally published at Economists Talk Art, based on: Molderez, I. & Ceulemans, K. (2018). The power of art to foster systems thinking, one of the key competencies of education for sustainable development. Journal of Cleaner Production, 186, 758-770.
By Amadou LÔ
Order or disorder? Stability or flexibility? Control or ‘laissez faire’? Issues linked to the management of long-term collective action have long been presented in a binary logic where choice fell within the scope of exclusivity. Today more than ever, the development of competitive strategies involves a logic suited to economic dynamics whose trends appear contradictory at first glance. At the same time, the evolution of collaborative practices and spaces are playing an important role in the transformation of our ways of working. The company Fab Lab is a manifestation of this which is interesting to analyse.
What is a company Fab Lab?
Recently, a new collaborative workspace dedicated to exploration was born: the Fab Lab. The Fabrication Laboratory [1] – commonly abbreviated to Fab Lab – is a workshop given over to innovation and rapid prototyping. It’s a space where people are free to come and go, swap ideas in a non-formal setting. The Fab Lab was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by professor Neil Gershenfeld in the 2000s. It’s a place that’s open to all, complete with equipment ranging from simple – like a soldering iron – to very sophisticated – like a 3D printer or a laser cutter. Creative and prototyping activities emerge through the interactions of an active community made up of individuals with a range of skills. This all takes place without hierarchies or orders being given.
Originally, Fab Labs were open areas, free and independent facilities located in community settings, whether educational or open to the general public. Up until now, this type of facility existed only in this form. Today, though, big businesses are getting interested in the concept and wish to put it to use in their own organisations in order to stimulate innovation. By opening its exploratory activities to members of production teams, the company Fab Lab poses an interesting challenge: how to reconcile employee production activities and exploratory activities. We worked within the innovation directorate of the French car manufacturer Renault, which has been a pioneer of this process since 2011.
The company Fab Lab, a chance for employees to explore
The Renault Group operates an internal Fab Lab which is a carrier for the upstream phase of the innovation process which is transversal to Renault’s matrix organisation. This process is defined as a regulatory process for all the “vehicle projects,” using precise signposting and a formal distinction in the distribution of functions. However, the people belonging to units of this process dedicated to production activities have complained about poor access to exploration activities.
The Fab Lab was therefore developed within Renault with the aim of bringing new opportunities for employees to get involved in exploratory activities alongside their usual activities. Through its location, its charter, its activities and its digitally-operated machines and tools, the company Fab Lab aspires to be a codified space which is also inclusive and permissive. It was conceived to be directly accessible by employees, so that they can individually carry out exploration activities alongside their production activities, ie, develop their individual ambidexterity.
Practices promoting employee ambidexterity within the company Fab LabWe have been able to put forward four main practices (table) which characterise the Fab Lab and which explain the emergence of this dynamic: improvisation, innovative design, DIY and rapid prototyping.
Table – practices promoting employee ambidexterity within the company Fab Lab
Improvisation
DIY
By manipulating and reorganising what is available, individuals learn to cope with a lack of resources and surmount conceptual obstacles “by doing”
Rapid prototyping
Through activities that bring ideas to life and accelerate the development of innovative projects
Our results show that the company Fab Lab constitutes a space conducive to exploration which supports employees wishing to carry out innovative projects alongside their usual production tasks.
It’s a space conducive to social interaction, open to all and all occupations, giving employees the opportunity to organise their time as they wish, between their usual occupation and their exploratory projects. Through this structure, employees get support for their exploratory activities, in the form of the practices we have highlighted – DIY, improvisation, prototyping and innovative design. The Fab Lab acts as an additional support alongside ordinary work, thus rectifying the lack of exploratory activities for employees. It therefore constitutes a facility for the development of employee ambidexterity.
As a physical space lending itself to social interaction, it is open to all and to all types of occupations, offering employees the chance to freely organise their time between their usual production activities and their exploratory projects. This facility allows employees to avail of assistance for their exploratory activities in the form of the practices already highlighted – DIY, improvisation, prototyping and innovative design. So the Fab Lab offers support that complements the workers’ ordinary activity by fulfilling employees’ need for exploratory activities. It therefore constitutes a facility which allows employees to develop ambidexterity.
Conclusion
The in-house Fab Lab offers an opportunity for businesses to use the digital revolution to deal with and adapt to the ever-changing environment of the markets and innovative practice. By offering employees in production units the chance to carry out exploratory activities, we’ve seen that the in-house Fab Lab plays the role of a valuable tool and a support for emerging employee ambidexterity. It takes the form of a safe space for exploratory activities and offers every employee the chance to manage their own work, between production and exploration, and hence to become ambidextrous.
We saw that when offering employees in production roles the opportunity to carry out exploratory activities, the internal Fab Lab is a useful tool and a support to the emergence of employee ambidexterity.
Table – summarises our collection methodology and the analysis of our research.Synthesis of the methodological framework of our research
By Yuliya SNIHUR
To establish an innovative business model, disruptive start-ups use a strategy resting on two complementary processes: building a discourse which will engage clients and partners in the new ecosystem, also known as framing, and continuous adaptation of their business model in response to the needs of clients. This will be illustrated by the case of Salesforce versus Siebel in the business software industry at the start of the 2000s.
Cases of successful disruptive innovation, where a start-up manages to radically transform the functioning of an industry, remain exceptional. Among the best-known are Amazon with the distribution and sale of books or Netflix which revolutionised the film distribution industry in the United States. They have resulted in the creation of a new business model which shifts the industrial ecosystem’s centre of gravity away from the historic leader and towards the start-up, and ends up creating a new ecosystem around the start-up. Businessmodel innovation is characterised by new sources of value creation, the arrival of new clients and partners and the implementation of a new kind of organisation, which rivals the business model of the historic leader and gradually replaces it.
Up until now, studies of disruptive innovation have been more interested in the reaction of existing businesses, and much less in the manner in which the start-up succeeded in establishing its business model. Hence, the importance of understanding the processes setin motion by the disruptor, which starts off with slender means with which to attract clients, partners, the media and analysts, and ends up taking the lead over an established and much more powerful competitor, and in some cases, making it disappear.This is the process that we call the disruptor strategy, whose aim is to reduce uncertainty in order to engage consumers and partners as players in the creation of the new ecosystem: from the outset, in order to get their attention and support, the start-up reveals itsintentions and ambitions through framing, ie, the construction of an effective discourse and presentation. At the same time, it must adapt its business model and its product to achieve the best possible offer for its clients and partners. The combination of these two actionscreates a virtuous circle and puts the historic leader on the horns of a dilemma: retaliate at the risk of legitimising the new business model, or do nothing and risk being overtaken.
The study of the emergence of Salesforce between 1999 and 2006 against Siebel in the management and client relation (CRM) software sector illustrates the concept of disruptor strategy. Originally, software publishers (Siebel, SAP) sold their clients CRM software andcostly products associated with maintenance and consulting services. Salesforce’s innovation consisted of coming up with a much less expensive business model, based on cloud computing, with SaaS services available by subscription. In the first instance, this product was aimed at consumers who were not part of the Siebel ecosystem.Before Salesforce had even launched, it was already addressing the ecosystem with a discourse emphasising its unique affinity with the “no software” revolution, and then its leadership, via press releases, interviews and dramatic stunts. This framing found an echo with start-ups and small-to-medium-sized businesses lacking the means to invest in a heavy system; with partners interested in the new ecosystem; and with the media and analysts who relayed and amplified Salesforce’s discourse and took up a more critical position in relation to Siebel. At the same time as new consumers were starting to get interested in the product, Salesforce was continually improving it to reach the standards expected by the majority of existing consumers. By combining these two framing processes and adapting the business model, the start-up had started to seduce Siebel’s clients and partners within two or three years.In the face of Salesforce’s offensive, Siebel didn’t react at first. The firm stayed with its old model without taking account of the new needs created by a competitor which it didn’t yet perceive as such. It only launched into the cloud in 2003, three years late. A vicious circle, symmetrical with Salesforce’s virtuous circle, falls into place: poor responses, mounting criticism in the media and from analysts, mass exodus of clients and partners to the new ecosystem. Finally, in 2006, Salesforce became the leading supplier of CRM services, while Siebel was bought by Oracle.
The Salesforce-Siebel case is a prime example of the establishment of a new business model. It highlights the importance of these two complementary processes of framing and adaptation in the disruptor’s strategy. This is, of course, an individual case, but it shares elements with other cases of successful disruption like Amazon and Netflix. For businesses, there are a number of lessons to be learned from these results. For the disruptors, it’s about the importance of pulling on both levers at the same time, given that the temporal window is limited. That means they have to find a way to reveal themselves clearly, but without being too precise, so as not to limit their scope for adaptation. In its framing, Salesforce presented itself as the leader by stating that it was offering a better value product and that its service was cheaper, but without going into the key points of the new business model.
For the leader, it’s hard to know how to react. Siebel had logical reasons for not responding to Salesforce in a market sector in which – at first at least – it had no interest. It’s very tricky to predict whether a start-up will be successfully disruptive or not. The problem is that Salesforce gained a competitive advantage by learning faster than Siebel. Siebel didn’t ask itself the right questions for several years, and the needs of Salesforce’s start-up clients were ahead of the needs of its own clients. When the firm did finally take action, its cloud didn’t function as well as Salesforce’s one, despite an R&D budget and far greater human resources.
To avoid this, existing businesses must therefore develop a strategic vision, an understanding of what is happening in their environment, in order to try to learn more quickly than the start-ups and be attentive to the market of tomorrow. But it’s very difficult for a firm to say that in 10 years’ time its clients will want products that are completely different from those it has on offer today.
This article is a synthesis of the publication “An Ecosystem-Level Process Model of Business Model Disruption: The Disruptor’s Gambit”, published in the Journal of Management Studies. It presents the results of a longitudinal study carried out by Yuliya Snihur (Toulouse Business School), Llewellyn D.W. Thomas (Imperial College London, Universitat Ramon Llull) and Robert A. Burgelman (Stanford School of Graduate Business), from the case study of Salesforce and Siebel, combining a theoretical approach and the analysis of a documentary base of historic data.
By Michaël Laviolette
It seems that every day, the media is full of examples of entrepreneurs and their success stories. They are often presented as heroic characters whose prowess leads most often to successful outcomes, and rarely to unsuccessful ones.
These entrepreneurs are therefore held up as exemplary rôle models according to a concept developed by Albert Bandura, social psychologist and expert in the theory of social learning.
In entrepreneurship, the impact of rôle models is significant because they offer examples which impact on the potential and the intention to engage in entrepreneurship. Many of today’s business people say they took their first steps in entrepreneurship after observing or being influenced by a rôle model. Often, it was someone in their close circle (friend, relative, etc). These are real-life rôle models. But what about symbolic rôle models? By this, we mean people we never actually meet, but whose stories we can identify with. For students, it might be the testimony of Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard graduate, that they saw in a newspaper, or a former student of a ‘grande école’ turned entrepreneur they hear at a conference. How do these symbolic models influence our own students’ intention to engage in entrepreneurship, depending on whether their stories are of success or failure? What impact do they have relative to certain characteristics (sex, previous experience, etc) of the people exposed to their stories?
We will look at these issues in the educational context because teachers use a lot of these rôle models in the form of testimonies, quotes or case studies. At a time when experiential learning is the order of the day in business schools, these models are being used prescriptively to show the path to follow or not follow when engaging in entrepreneurship. Are these professors’ persuasive tactics effective? What is their impact on student self-efficacy and their intention to be entrepreneurial? In other words, let’s focus on those who are looking at the model, rather than the model itself.
A number of experiments were carried out involving 276 students in a French business school. Some students had been exposed earlier to success or failure stories of former students turned businesspeople. Other groups heard the stories along with a message of encouragement from their tutors. In keeping with the literature, we tested several main and secondary hypotheses of this causal chain which begins with student attitudes to the rôle models’ messages and ends with their intention to engage in entrepreneurship.
Our results were published in three articles in the Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research, in the Revue Internationale PME and in the Journal of Enterprising Culture. The first article 2 reveals that symbolic entrepreneur models, whether of success of failure, had a significant impact on students’ intentions to engage in entrepreneurship. The more positive the students’ attitude to the message, the more they were affected or moved by these stories. This “emotional awakening” reinforces their perception of their capacity to be entrepreneurs (‘entrepreneurial self-efficacy’) and, ultimately, their intention to engage in entrepreneurship. We can therefore validate the central hypothesis of the impact of these symbolic models. Positive messages increase the intention to engage, while negative messages reduce it.
However, these effects change depending on the sex of the person receiving the message. Men are more influenced by models of success than women are. The latter are more influenced by negative models. This difference is explained by social norms which exemplify entrepreneurship as an eminently masculine activity. Indeed, men identify more easily with models of success. This upward and positive comparison comes easier to them. Women, on the other hand, have more difficulty identifying with female entrepreneurs and they are more affected by stories of failure. The downward and negative comparison unfortunately comes more easily to them.
The fact that the impact of the messages varies according to the recipient leads us to envisage two persuasive communication tactics in class. It’s important to expose students to both success and failure stories in order to avoid idealising entrepreneurship. It’s also important to emphasise positive models at the expense of negative ones. For the sake of realism, the latter are not to be banned but the lecturer should play a moderating rôle to ensure that the failure models are not too discouraging.
The second article 3 focuses more on the rôle of teacher encouragement when students receive these testimonies of success or failure, As well as the entrepreneurs’ messages, we exposed our students to a second message of encouragement from the teacher, reformulating the messages in order to reinforce their effects.We thought that this persuasive tactic would strengthen the impact of the initial message if it was positive and weaken it if it was negative. However, the results show that the encouragement discourages rather than encourages when its content is identical whether the receivers are men or women. A finer analysis of the results nonetheless shows interesting differences according to the sex of the students receiving the message.
Although a distraction effect can’t be ruled out with the second message, the principal explanation can be found in Brehm’s reactance theory. When a student is exposed to the message of an individual with whom s/he identifies (a former student), s/he is free to attribute any value s/he wishes to it. On the other hand, when a lecturer intervenes to try to convince or persuade, s/he reduces his or her freedom of interpretation. Indeed, students can re-establish their autonomy by resisting the lecturer’s remarks.
However, reactance is stronger among men than women. This difference can also be explained by social norms which construct entrepreneurship as a fundamentally masculine activity. Encouraged by these norms, men are likely to express an opinion contrary to that of the lecturer to express their free will even if they really think the same thing. For women, the lecturer’s encouragement is sought in order to confirm their opinion and to gain social approval. Indeed, our research shows that lecturer encouragement is more beneficial when female students are exposed to female rôle models.
Our articles also show that in order to understand the impact of rôle models, the characteristics of the recipients (sex, in this case) are important. Thus, our third article 4 focuses on the moderating effects of the characteristics of the recipients, notably self-esteem, locus of control, and previous experience. The locus of control is our feeling that events are within our control or not. Previous experience is students’ past experience of entrepreneurship.
Our results show that the better the students’ self-esteem, locus of internal control and previous experience, the less the recipient is impacted by the message. Indeed, students with high self-esteem and a belief in their capacity to control what happens to them, are naturally less influenced by external models. In other words, they rely more on their own resources in order to believe in their capacity to engage in enterprise, and ultimately, to decide to create.
In contrast, students with weak self-esteem, a weak locus of internal control and weak experience are more influenced by external models. Indeed, these students have a greater need to look for external validation to compensate for the weakness of their own belief in their own capacity for enterprise. These results round off our analyses by showing that it’s just as important to analyse the profile of the recipients if we want to understand the impact of the messages.
What conclusions should be drawn from our studies of the relationship between rôle models and the intention to engage in entrepreneurship in the educational context? First of all, they validate the importance of these models for students’ capacity and intention to engage in entrepreneurship, even if they are only symbolic. They also underline that a variety of models of both failure and success is crucial to offering more credible representations to a student audience. Nonetheless, these rôle models do not impact men and women in the same way.
In view of the predominance of masculine models of entrepreneurship, it is important to temper the impact of these models using lecturer encouragement tactics, particularly for female students. Nonetheless, it should be noted that this encouragement is not effective for men who are often more confident in their own capacity for enterprise. Finally, on the whole, these models have a greater impact on students who doubt their capacity for enterprise due to their weak self-esteem, weak locus of internal control and weak experience.
In conclusion, this research confirms that a single model of entrepreneurial success is not the most effective method for every audience. A plurality of models is needed to convince a diverse audience. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as Oscar Wilde reminded us. Look at the model but above all, look at the person who is observing it.
This article synthesizes our work on the influence of role models on students’ intention to engage in entrepreneurship. The work was undertaken jointly with Olivier Brunel, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the Lyon School of Management (IAE de Lyon) and Miruna Radu-Lefebvre, Professor of Entrepreneurship and chair of Family Business and Society (Entreprise Familiale et Société) at Audiencia Business School, Nantes.