The simple answer is YES, and there are thousands out  there who have created business empires without attending a single university lecture.

And there are those who started at university, and called it quits (or left) to start their own business; Gates started at Harvard University, and left to  found with Paul Allen a software company which we now know as Microsoft. Apple's founder Steve Jobs also dropped out of college, as also Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.

You do not need a university education to  have an idea and to follow your dream of creating a business. There are many studies which try to discover the characteristics that make one successful  as an entrepreneur.

Self-efficacy, determination, creativity are amongst some of characteristics that influence entrepreneurial success. If you have them, you can be  a success like the  thousands WITHOUT university/college education, or even  without completing school education.  College education which fosters the above characteristics can  perhaps  make the entrepreneurial journey somewhat easier.

Creativity is what  gives a would-be entrepreneurs the new  ideas needed to start a business.

Given the aforesaid, a person without  university education, has  to be more enterprising, and if they are successful, they obviously have been enterprising...

Thank for your support, this theme is very interesting to research. Best regards. I am going to start a proyect, when i hace complete, i will lift in this space....

The universities provide an ecosystem of further developing enterprising skills in the students which are already present in them. Enterprising skills like creativity & innovation, leadership, empathy and self-efficacy are already there in the students, the instructor only tries to hone and nurture those skills according to the market demand. Apart from globally known successful entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs,Bill Gates, etc. who had been some how related to universities, there are numerous entrepreneurs who had never been to university and are the owners of successful entrepreneurial ventures.

Thank you for Your support,

I agree fully with the previous answers, meaning that there are many excellent examples of successful entrepreneurs who never attended a university lecture. However, the complex answer is that depends also of the university, since a university dedicated to developing entrepreneurship skills may help. A good example is Stanford University which is well-known for its vision concerning business and entrepreneurship. Larry Page and Serghey Brin were Ph.D. students at Stanford University when they decided to create Google. The university may help in developing soft skills, which are important in any enterprise. Also, a good university may help with its network of successful business people.

Senor Carrera-Jimenz,

He died aged 91 years,  and billionaire many times over, just two days ago on 28 January; he was 17 years of age when he started his entrepreneurial journey, and his  Scandinavian furniture characterised by clean elegant lines can be found in many homes, including mine -- my books are on bookshelves that I bought at his store.  He was  Ingvar Kamprad, the son of a poor farmer in Smaland, Sweden. 

He sold cheap but well-designed furniture that the buyer had to pick up at any IKEA warehouse, in flatpacks,  all round the world, complete with nuts, bolts, screws and assembly drawings. That was his business model as we know it-- the buyer had to do at home some work also!. His business model  can be viewed as a highly innovative. Yet,  he had not been anywhere near a university and had a fortune of more  $50B at his passing. If anything, Kamprad shows one does not have to go to university  to be an extremely successful  entrepreneur.  As his business grew, he obviously used the brainpower of  many others to grow and extend  his business reach and to become even bigger than ever before. Still, we must acknowledge he had no university education, and his education was obtained at the university of life!  What a man, what a genius, what an entrepreneur, what an inspiration!

It is a shame, but the contributing in today is the inspiration for many people...When the being human believes more in your own intelligence over the physical strength. He begins to transcend.

Dear Sir,

I suggest that you answer the following questions:

1-What are the skills to be an entrepreneur?

2-Do university studies provide these skills?

You can refer to Shumpeter's definition of the entrepreneur.

Then you will have the confirmation that a university degree is not needed to be or become a successful entrepreneur.

Sincerely Yours

Soumaya SFEIR

For sure we have many examples of great entrepreneurs that prove a university degree is not needed. However, more knowledge and skills always help each individual to become better. It is hard to measure, but in a proper educational environment, knowledge and skills always increase and thus each individual can obtain a better version of himself/herself.

Javier,

If you were to build a research project on the issue of entrepreneurship and university education, you may take either a qualitative path or quantitative path. The qualitative path is well-trodden in the non-peer reviewed business press, and many examples have been cited above. If you go down the quantitative path, you would be hard pressed to come up with an appropriate random sample and would likely end up using a sample of convenience, which may or not be representative of the population.

I've spent the first half of my career in Silicon Valley (I'm currently working on a PhD for a career change for the back half) and the area is replete with college dropouts. I worked for Don Massaro, who dropped out of a PhD program at UC Berkeley to work at IBM and later became a 29 year old CEO of Shugart Associates, an early disk drive maker. (Don became CEO when founder Al Shugart was fired by the VCs and who founded rival Seagate.) Don is the inventor of the 5 1/4" floppy disk drive, and later ran the Office Products Division at Xerox, where the entire modern personal computing paradigm was invented (at Xerox PARC). For the Alto III, they developed the iconic desktop, mouse pointing device, WYSIWYG word processor, spreadsheet, Ethernet networking, and the laser printer. Don has a great story about Steve Jobs and Macintosh after Steve saw the Alto III at a trade show. If you go the case study route and want an introduction to Don, I could probably arrange it.

For what it is worth, there is a great book on how Xerox totally blew it with computing titled Fumbling the Future.

-Greg Olsen

Thanks, i am going to prepare my aproach and aim, i am researching in social economic and triple helix method

Yes and many examples are bound with people with little or no education demonstrating more enterprising behaviours. Factors such as family background, personal motivation. Necessity, among others are all contributing factors aside education.

Yes, this is always the case anyway. Universities don’t teach people how to take risk but to engage in safe jobs. Risk taking is an important step in all entrepreneurial endeavours. If universities can teach and encourage students to take risk with their knowledge acquired, certificates will serve a bigger purpose

Dear Mr Carrera Jimenez:

I would say that in the past, entrepreunership could born in uneducated people. In our days, the world is much more complex, so I doubt entrepreneurs can have success wthout going to University. What can be true is that they generally do not end their careers, because their mind is pressed to follow other paths, not to end with a certificate,

Regards

Gustavo Concari

this is the thruth, the University follow to the student to see another world of opportunities and challenges

My answer is Yes and No. Of course, we should look at the number of successful enterprises built by people who have or haven't university trainings when we answer to this question. More importantly, we should also investigate the differences of successful/failure rate in terms of starting their new enterprises between the populations of those who have and haven't university trainings. According to the common sense, people with university training may have better analytical skills, which allow them to the failure chance in their starting new enterprises. However, the analytical skill may be a double edge sword. Over doing analysis may lead entrepreneurs to miss excellent investment opportunities. I believe there is no right or wrong answer to this question.

Thanks for your input, the question is very open and not so direct, but it is for the debate, it can be analyzed by region or culture or gender, etc.

Who bet on something innovative or new technology, it succeeds.

Entrepreneurship is about who can take risk; it is not about how much education a person has that make him a good entrepreneur. In my community, there are so many rich entrepreneurs who never received any form of education; they were just daring and ready to sacrifice. Education does not necessarily ensure entrepreneurship success.

The non educated entrepreneurs in my country have even employed more graduates than the government. education is necessary in this situation just to help one to be able to speak and write, present business proposals etc but education is not a determining factor as to whether one becomes a successful entrepreneur or not.

Thanks for your contribution. The entrepreneur is not the same as a man of business, although many start as entrepreneurs...

Each person is obliged to be part of the development of a country. People do not choose in which social or economic group they are born. But if they can improve their current economic conditions. The motivation must begin by the change within ourselves. Today we are better and tomorrow we will be much more. Countries that have reached a level of social economic and technological progress did not do so in one year. It took decades and other centuries.