Soapbox August 21, 2012 10:30 am Lessons on buy-ins as well as lessons on start-ups are needed By Sophie Manigart and Miguel Meuleman Jumping on the bandwagon set in motion by prestigious business schools, many business schools have embraced entrepreneurship as a core area in which they want to excel. Most of these programmes focus on how to set up and grow a new business. The ultimate goal, they claim, is to see a sizeable fraction of their graduates opt for a career as an entrepreneur and start a new venture. This goal, however, is hard to achieve. The route to starting and building a successful new venture is fraught with difficulties. Finding a value-creating business opportunity is not easy, especially for non-technical individuals operating outside technology clusters. And it is common knowledge that most of these ventures never achieve the growth hoped for in their business plan. Some may survive, others will be killed off due to lack of customer interest, finance, or the impossibility of delivering at acceptable costs. As a result, for many MBA graduates, entrepreneurship is limited to an academic exercise on business plan writing. More Soapbox But is this the only way to teach entrepreneurship? More and more MBA students aspire to be independent, rather than spending their professional career as managers in large companies being accountable to numerous layers of bosses. Another way to realise their entrepreneurial potential is to take over an existing company through a management buy-in. Given the huge number of