Learning from Successful Entrepreneurs Boosts Student Startups

Learning from Successful Entrepreneurs Boosts Student Startups

One afternoon in a Romanian university classroom, a group of graduate students was asked to do something unusual. Instead of studying a textbook on business models or calculating net present value, they were told to pick a successful entrepreneur they admired and study that person’s story. Not for a grade. Not for a presentation. Just to understand what made that entrepreneur tick.

What happened next surprised even the researchers running the experiment. The students didn’t just get inspired. They changed how they thought about the entire purpose of starting a business.

Gabriela Boldureanu and her colleagues at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University ran this experiment with 30 graduate students enrolled in a Business Creation course, and the results, published in Sustainability in 2020, suggest something counterintuitive about how we teach entrepreneurship. The standard approach, heavy on business plans and pitch decks, might be missing the point entirely. What students actually need is a mirror held up to people who have already done it (Boldureanu et al., 2020).

Why Your Business Professor Might Be Wrong

The traditional model of entrepreneurship education is built on a quiet assumption: that teaching students the mechanics of starting a business, the spreadsheets, the legal structures, the market analysis, will produce entrepreneurs. It is the educational equivalent of handing someone a cookbook and expecting them to become a chef.

Boldureanu and her team took a different angle. They asked whether exposure to successful entrepreneurial role models could shift not just what students know, but what they want. The study drew on three theoretical frameworks. Human capital theory suggests that skills and knowledge drive entrepreneurial success. Self efficacy theory says that people need to believe they can do something before they try. Self determination theory argues that motivation requires autonomy, competence, and relatedness. All three point to the same conclusion: role models might be the missing ingredient (Boldureanu et al., 2020).

The researchers designed a pilot experiment that mixed qualitative and quantitative methods. Thirty graduate students, some from business backgrounds and some from non business fields, were enrolled in a Business Creation course. Before the intervention, the students filled out questionnaires measuring their entrepreneurial intentions and attitudes. Then came the exposure.

Each student chose a successful entrepreneur they admired. Some picked famous names like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Others chose local Romanian entrepreneurs whose stories they knew firsthand. The students studied their chosen models in depth, analyzing their paths, their failures, their decisions. Then they discussed what they had learned in class.

After the intervention, the students filled out the same questionnaires again. The differences were striking.

The Surprising Shift in What Students Actually Want

Here is where the results get interesting. The researchers expected that exposure to successful entrepreneurs would make students want to start businesses. It did. But that is not the surprising part.

What Boldureanu and her colleagues found was that the students’ motivations for wanting to start a business had fundamentally shifted. Before the intervention, students tended to cite financial reasons for entrepreneurship: high income, wealth accumulation, financial independence. After studying successful entrepreneurial models, their priorities changed. They became significantly more oriented toward the social benefits of entrepreneurship, particularly job creation (Boldureanu et al., 2020).

This is not what most entrepreneurship programs are designed to do. Most programs emphasize the financial upside. They teach students how to capture value, how to maximize returns, how to build something that makes money. But this study suggests that when students see real people who have done it, they start to care about something bigger than the paycheck.

The researchers measured this shift quantitatively. The students’ perceptions of entrepreneurship as a way to create new jobs increased significantly after the intervention, while their focus on high income as a primary motivation decreased. The authors argue that this reorientation toward social benefits is a sign of deeper engagement with entrepreneurship as a meaningful career path, not just a get rich quick scheme (Boldureanu et al., 2020).

The One Thing Educators Keep Getting Wrong

The most provocative finding in the study is also the most practical. Boldureanu and her team discovered that exposure to entrepreneurial role models does not work the same way for everyone. In fact, it works differently for business students than for non business students (Boldureanu et al., 2020).

This is the kind of finding that makes educators uncomfortable because it means one size fits all approaches are not just inefficient. They might be counterproductive.

Business students, who already have some grounding in entrepreneurial concepts, responded to role models by becoming more confident in their own abilities. Their entrepreneurial self efficacy, the belief that they could actually start a business, increased significantly. They saw the role models as proof that they could do it too.

Non business students responded differently. Their entrepreneurial intentions increased, but their self efficacy did not. They wanted to start businesses, but they did not necessarily believe they could. For these students, the role models seemed to highlight the gap between where they were and where they wanted to be.

The researchers concluded that graduate programs should be designed differently for business and non business students. Business students might benefit from exposure to role models as a confidence booster. Non business students might need additional support, mentorship, or skills training to bridge the gap that the role models reveal (Boldureanu et al., 2020).

What Students Actually Think Makes an Entrepreneur Successful

Before the intervention, the researchers asked students to list the characteristics they associated with successful entrepreneurs. The answers reveal a lot about how young people think about success.

The most frequently mentioned traits were innovation, vision, risk taking, and perseverance. Students saw entrepreneurs as people who see things differently, who are willing to take chances, and who do not give up when things get hard. These are the classic traits of the entrepreneurial myth. The lone genius who defies the odds.

But after the intervention, something shifted. The students started talking about different qualities. They mentioned the ability to build teams, to listen to customers, to adapt when things go wrong, to learn from failure. The myth of the solitary visionary gave way to a more realistic picture of entrepreneurship as a social and collaborative process (Boldureanu et al., 2020).

This shift matters because it changes what students think they need to learn. If entrepreneurship is about being a visionary, then you either have it or you do not. But if it is about learning to work with people, to adapt, to persist through failure, then those are skills that can be taught.

What This Study Does Not Prove

The study has real limitations. It was a pilot experiment with only 30 students, all from a single university in Romania. The results are suggestive, not definitive. The researchers themselves describe it as a first step, not a final answer.

The study also cannot tell us whether the changes in attitudes and intentions actually translate into real world startup activity. Students might leave the class feeling more inspired but never actually start a business. Intentions are not actions.

There is also the question of selection bias. Students who choose to enroll in a Business Creation course are probably already interested in entrepreneurship. The study does not tell us what would happen if you exposed students who have no interest in business to entrepreneurial role models. Would it spark something, or would it fall flat?

And then there is the question of which role models work best. The students chose their own, which means they picked people they already admired. Would the same effect occur if educators assigned role models? Or would it feel forced and lose its power?

These are open questions. The study raises them more than it answers them.

What This Actually Means

The practical takeaways from this study are direct and actionable for anyone designing entrepreneurship education.

• ▸Replace abstract theory with real stories. Students learn more from studying a specific entrepreneur’s journey than from memorizing business models. The stories make the concepts concrete and the path feel possible.

• ▸Let students choose their own role models. The power of the intervention came from students picking entrepreneurs they personally admired. Forcing a list of approved role models would likely dilute the effect.

• ▸Separate business and non business students. The two groups respond differently to role models. Business students need confidence building. Non business students need skills training and support to close the gap between inspiration and capability.

• ▸Expect students to shift their motivations. If you expose students to successful entrepreneurs, do not be surprised when they start caring more about creating jobs than making money. This is not a failure of the intervention. It is a sign that they are thinking more deeply about what entrepreneurship actually means.

• ▸Measure what changes. The researchers did not just ask whether students wanted to start businesses. They asked why. That distinction matters. A student who wants to start a business to create jobs is different from one who wants to get rich. The first is more likely to persist through the hard parts.

The students in that Romanian classroom walked away with more than just inspiration. They walked away with a different understanding of what success looks like. And that might be the most important thing an entrepreneurship class can teach.