Entrepreneurship is a Discipline. Mays is Teaching It.
Executive director of Mays’ new Center for Applied Entrepreneurship and Innovation Levi Belnap on teaching entrepreneurship, innovation, and the potential for Mays to turn “the Texas Triangle” into our version of Silicon Valley.POINT OF VIEW
I wish I could have started a business when the internet or smartphones were just catching on. Now it feels too late, like everything has already been done.”
My 15-year-old son said that to me recently.
Looking backward, opportunity always feels obvious. In the moment, most of us miss it. Change brings uncertainty, and our instinct is often to avoid it. We look for familiar paths that feel safer or more predictable. Entrepreneurs tend to respond differently. They move toward uncertainty with intention, weighing risk and possibility in new ways.
That contrast raises a familiar question. Are entrepreneurs born or made? I pose a different one: Which entrepreneurial qualities are harder to learn, and which can be developed with the right preparation? Comfort with ambiguity, emotional resilience, and intrinsic motivation are hard to teach. But opportunity recognition, risk assessment, experimentation, and judgment are highly teachable. Entrepreneurship is not a personality type. It is a discipline.
Historical eras of large-scale economic change, from the Industrial Revolution to electrification to the internet, have consistently produced waves of new entrepreneurial activity. In these periods, old assumptions stop working. New problems emerge, along with new possibilities for those prepared to recognize them.
We are living through another such moment. Rapid technological advancement, economic reconfiguration, and geopolitical shifts are reshaping industries and careers in real time. Periods like this do not reward certainty or perfect prediction. They reward those prepared to recognize opportunity in uncertainty and take action.
Opportunity, however, is never evenly distributed. In past entrepreneurial inflection points, people moved toward places where new economic rules were being written. New York in 1776. Northern California in the late 1950s. Today, the Texas Triangle is emerging as a similar opportunity cluster, powered by scale, growth, and an unusually diverse mix of industries — brimming with revenue growth and promise.
History shows that entrepreneurship expands in moments of change, not because people suddenly become different, but because the environment demands new ways of thinking and acting. Our responsibility at Mays is to ensure more students are prepared to recognize and act on those moments as they emerge as young professionals in the heart of the Texas Triangle.
Entrepreneurship in Action
The Center for Applied Entrepreneurship and Innovation helps students explore, test, build, buy, and transform businesses in real markets.
