On Thursday, September 4th, 2008 the Hamilton County Alliance will host the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour, an event directed at high school students, college students, and local community members.

The goal of the tour is to inspire young entrepreneurs to dream big goals and to build a plan to achieve them, and when you start reading the bios of the speakers, it's hard not to be inspired. So many of them have started successful businesses before they could legally vote, that any kid who ever thought he needed to be an adult before he could achieve something, would think twice about "waiting."

There is an article in Business Week about a new book that confronts the age-old "academics only" debate of whether entrepreneurialism can be learned. The book is called Entrepreneurial Excellence: Profit From the Best Ideas of the Experts (Career Press; 2007) and it is written by a man named Richard Goossen. It seems Goossen unsurprisingly arrives at the conclusion that a fair bit of entrepreneurialism can be taught, and an equally fair bit can't. Among the attributes of successful entrepreneurs that can be taught he identifies:

1. General business knowledge
2. General entrepreneurial principles 
3. General opportunity awareness

As far as what can't be taught, the article specifically mentions "venture specific opportunity principles."

Perhaps the article doesn't do the book justice, but I have a hard time gleaning any applicable wisdom from the learnable and innate qualities Goosen has identified. Not only are the points are too general and full of empty talk (what's the meaningful difference between general opportunity awareness and venture specific opportunity principles?), but I have to ask one of my favorite questions, so what? Who cares?

Rather than the article failing, I think it's more likely that finally understanding what entrepreneurial qualities are in-born and which are learned doesn't really promise us anything interesting that we can use. Entrepreneurship is one of the few careers where you have the ability to build around your strengths, whatever they may be. I called this an "academics only" debate because I doubt people actually starting a company or building a startup are worrying whether they will fail because they weren't born with the right set up skills. If they are, I doubt they possess the most important quality important to any success, entrepreneurial or otherwise, which is confidence.