In Conversation With Patrick Turner, INSEAD Professor

After spending ten years with Levi Strauss Europe, Patrick Turner left Levi’s in order to launch his own jeans marketing company, after which he subsequently acquired and managed another small company, both in Spain. Now, he is Affiliate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise at INSEAD and has been at the institution since 1999, specifically teaching MBA courses on acquisitions, new business creation, and managing growth ventures, on both the Fontainebleau and Singapore campuses.

In addition to the entrepreneurship courses he teaches at INSEAD, Professor Turner is a Visiting Professor at Reykjavik University, Iceland, and has also taught courses in France, Spain, Estonia, and South America.

I have known Professor Turner for several years now so when it turned out that INSEAD was involved in Martell VSOP’s The Ultimate Start-Up Space challenge (TUSS), I took the opportunity to catch up with Prof Turner again and chat with him to find out his thoughts on the TUSS finalists and entrepreneurship in Singapore.

On INSEAD’s Involvement in The Ultimate Startup Space

We started off our chat by talking about how INSEAD got to be involved in the TUSS challenge. While the exact start of the relationship is unclear, Prof Turner spoke about the fit between the TUSS audience and that of the institution: that Martell Cognac consumers are potential INSEAD Executive Ed programme students. Prof Turner describes, “The young, upwardly mobile and ambitious people, as well as the older guys like me.”

So given the similarity of overall interests of both parties, and also because Pernod Ricard (the company behind Martell) have been longstanding consumers of the INSEAD Executive Education programme, INSEAD contributed to the programme by providing four 90-minute training sessions to the top 10 finalists and also an Executive Education course for the winning team!

On The Difference Between INSEAD Students And The TUSS Finalists

I wanted to find out more about the actual teaching experience of Prof Turner with regards to his usual classes at INSEAD vis-à-vis the TUSS finalists and so we got talking about the profiles of the two groups.

While the average age of an MBA student at INSEAD is 28 or 29 with about 80 nationalities amongst the students, the TUSS finalists were a lot younger and have much less professional experience, if at all. And of course, the finalists were quite a homogenous lot in terms of nationality owing to the requirement of the competition to have a Singapore citizen or Permanent Resident.

Thus, before starting classes, Prof Turner admitted to being surprised at how little difference there was between the TUSS finalists compared to his usual INSEAD students. Though much younger and much less experienced, the TUSS finalists picked things up very fast.

“I used material that I used normally. Material that I’ve used here and at universities in Europe.” Prof Turner emphasized that there was no need to simplify the course material for the finalists. And since topics ranged from Idea Generation, Marketing for Startups, Financing & Legal Issues, Team to the Business Plan, participants had a “good typical feel of the curriculum”.

However, one notable difference between the MBA students and TUSS finalists that Prof Turner found “amusing” is that the former seemed to disappear from the classrooms right after it was obvious that class has ended. On the other hand, the finalists “wouldn’t move!”

Everyone was very into the classes and eager to learn, even when it was quarter past 9, no one complained. (Classes were supposed to end at 9pm.)