ENTREPRENEURSHIP
network that MBA students have access to can also be leveraged for entrepreneurship, with classmates becoming co-founders, customers, suppliers, or fellow entrepreneurs who can share the journey. While graduates of MBA and other programmes at an equivalent level have good job prospects and are commonly able to command decent salaries, the consequences of failure as the founder of a startup are often higher than those of other graduates. Working long hours for no money, taking a longer time to potentially be successful while your classmates are in good jobs earning decent money and benchmarking your trajectory against other post‑MBA career paths can increase that barrier. While fear of failure can act as a natural brake against reckless behaviour, it is also dangerously limiting for an entrepreneur who wants to start a business and grow their venture with new products and new markets. Research has demonstrated, for example, that fear of failure can make entrepreneurs invest more resources into a doomed venture. Yet intriguingly, in research conducted for a paper that I co-authored in 2024, published in the Journal of the International Council for Small Business , we found that many female entrepreneurs were hedging their bets with a new venture by running side hustles and other smaller projects at the same time. This is a strategy that can be good risk management, but it also takes time and resources away from the main venture. Lastly, it’s always worth reminding students that many successful entrepreneurs have failed big before ultimately becoming successful. This illustrious list includes the likes of Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, showing that failure is not terminal. Perhaps this quote from renowned author Mark Twain sums it up best: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.”
as those running university spin-offs who they can talk to about their experience. By understanding their limitations, they can enrol on courses or opt for training – if they feel they lack finance skills, for instance, there is ample opportunity to address this. The entrepreneurial career path Business schools are in a particularly good position to address prospective entrepreneurs’ fear of failure by delving into the psychology behind the concept. After all, many business students now consider entrepreneurship as a serious career option, particularly at MBA level. At my institution, there are a number of recent examples of successful companies founded by alumni, such as Lyfeguard, a platform that helps people manage important financial, personal and legal information; Driverly, a company that provides insurance intelligence using AI; Purfetch, which utilises next-gen technology to detect signs of unusual behaviour, emotional stress or possible health issues in household pets; and Blue Concept Asia, offering a bespoke wealth management service. Contributing to the success of MBA entrepreneurs is the way in which the programme’s theoretical grounding offers tangible applications to the real world, as well as its opportunities for experiential learning, such as live consultancy projects. The
Robert Phillips is a senior lecturer at Alliance Manchester Business School and the Masood Enterprise Centre, University of Manchester. Phillips also runs the university’s EPSRC-funded Research to Enterprise programme, which encourages students and staff to be more enterprising
Business Impact • ISSUE 1 • 2026
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