Should we teach entrepreneurship to students who don't want to be entrepreneurs?

I came across an interesting discussion last week — an episode of Brighteye's Sidekick podcast that ranged from how universities prepare students for work to alternatives to the traditional degree, and what lifelong education might eventually look like. The discussion was around education as a career-long membership rather than a one-off purchase in your twenties.

Listening to it from a fashion education perspective, a different idea stayed with me.

Starting a business can be an extraordinary education. You learn because you have to. There is a customer to understand, money to manage, something to sell, decisions to make and consequences when those decisions are wrong.

But most fashion students will not start businesses. Most young people won't either.

That raised a different question for me:

Should we teach entrepreneurship to students who don't want to be entrepreneurs?

I think we should.

Not because everybody should start a company. But because entrepreneurship as a career choice and entrepreneurial thinking as a skill are two very different things.

You don't need to own the business to think about the business

Most fashion graduates who stay in the industry will work inside existing companies.

A buyer may be deciding how to spend a limited budget without knowing exactly what customers will want six months later. Someone in wholesale may be deciding which market or customer is worth pursuing. A merchandiser has to understand how product, stock, price and demand affect one another. Those are not entrepreneurial jobs in the usual sense, but they require some of the same judgement.

You have incomplete information. You have constraints. You make a choice, knowing that choosing one thing usually means giving something else up. Then you see what happens.

That is why I find the distinction important.

Entrepreneurship is one possible career. Entrepreneurial thinking is a way of approaching problems.

And it does not necessarily come naturally.

Initiative is often expected before it is taught

Fashion employers value initiative, but young people enter work with very different ideas about what initiative actually means.

Some immediately understand that they can ask another question, suggest something, introduce themselves to somebody in another department or look beyond the task they were given. Others wait for instructions.

That does not make them less intelligent or less capable. Often they have simply spent years in environments where success meant understanding what was being asked and producing the right answer.

Businesses are messier.

There may be evidence pointing in one direction, but very often there is no answer at the back of the book. Someone still has to decide.

Much of that judgement is eventually learned on the job. In that sense, I agree with another idea from the Sidekick discussion: learning does not end when formal education does.

I would go further. Work is already one of our most important forms of lifelong learning. You learn because a new responsibility arrives. A customer behaves differently from what you expected.

Something goes wrong. You move into a more senior role and suddenly need to understand a part of the business you had previously only seen from the outside.

Entrepreneurial skills are often developed in exactly the same way.

My question is whether we have to wait until the stakes are real.

Teaching ownership, not just startups

Entrepreneurship education can easily become education about starting a company: finding an idea, writing a business plan, raising money, launching. There is a place for that.

But for students who do not want to become founders, perhaps the more useful element is ownership of a decision.

If this were your fashion label, what would you do?

Suddenly subjects that can look separate in a curriculum start connecting.

A pricing decision affects the customer you can target, the margin you make, the product you can afford to create and the stores that might sell it. A marketing decision means choosing where limited money should go rather than simply designing a campaign. Hiring someone means first understanding what work needs doing and whether specialist expertise is worth paying for.

The learner doesn't need to intend to start a company for any of this to be useful. They are practising what it feels like to be responsible for the consequence of a choice.

Why this matters particularly in fashion

Fashion education already does a lot to bring students closer to industry. Practitioners teach. Companies set live briefs. Guest lecturers explain their roles. Placements give students experience of real workplaces. Those things matter enormously.

But fashion is also a highly interconnected business taught through increasingly specialised pathways. A student may study marketing, buying and merchandising, styling, communication or design in depth, while the company they eventually join depends on all of those functions affecting one another.

Understanding your own function is important. Understanding why it exists inside the business is something slightly different.

That is where I think entrepreneurial thinking can add value even for someone who never wants to be a founder.

The founder's perspective makes connections difficult to avoid. A product idea creates a pricing question. The pricing decision creates a positioning question. Positioning changes the customer.

Finding that customer creates marketing and sales decisions.

The business forces the subjects to meet.

Why Sim de la Mode uses the founder's seat

This is one reason learners build a virtual fashion label in Sim de la Mode.

The aim is not to persuade every learner to become an entrepreneur.

The first missions are much more foundational: understanding the industry and beginning to

make decisions about the label they are creating. Over time, the decisions become more complex as the journey moves from an idea towards a business plan, launch and eventually running the label in simulation.

The founder's seat is useful because it gives the learner responsibility for those decisions.

One person may discover that starting a label sounds exciting. Another may decide they never want that responsibility — but realise that they are fascinated by buying, merchandising, marketing or another part of the business.

That is an equally useful result.

The point is not that everyone should become the founder. It is that more learners could benefit from seeing the business from the founder's side of the desk.

What we can borrow from entrepreneurship

Becoming an entrepreneur cannot be the alternative we offer everyone. Most people will spend at least part of their careers working for somebody else, and there is nothing lesser about that path.

What we can borrow from entrepreneurship is the learning that comes from having to decide — including the hardest lesson: that information will sometimes be incomplete, that resources are limited and that a reasonable decision can still produce a bad result.

And that when that happens, the next question isn't Was I right?

It is What did I learn, and what would I do differently now?

Fashion does not need every student to become a founder.

But it has plenty of room for more people who understand how to think like one.

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Ekaterina Adamovich spent twenty years in fashion buying, wholesale, consulting and education before founding Sim de la Mode — an iOS game that teaches fashion business through interactive missions where players build their own virtual fashion brand. Phase 1 is free on the App Store, with new learning missions launching in August 2026. Pilots with a small number of institutions are planned this autumn — get in touch if you're interested in a pilot.