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Learning to See What Could Be
What if one of the most important people in an economy isn't the government, a bank, or a giant corporation, but the person who notices something everyone else has missed? Maybe it's a restaurant owner who realizes people want healthier lunches. A mechanic who finds a faster way to solve a common problem. Or a teenager who figures out how to turn a hobby into a business. That person is an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship starts with something deceptively simple: seeing an opportunity and acting on it. That's one reason entrepreneurship is so important to Austrian economics. In Austrian economics, the entrepreneur acts as the helmsman at the helm of the ship, steering production to meet the ultimate destination set by the sovereign consumer, who are the true captains or owners of the economic vessel. Their buying choices dictate what gets produced and where the economy moves. The economy isn't a machine that can simply be designed and managed from the top down. It is constantly changing, shaped by millions of people making decisions, responding to information, experimenting, and discovering new possibilities.
An entrepreneur sees a problem and thinks, “There has to be a better way.”
Then comes the hard part: doing something about it. They invest time and money. They build a product, open a store, develop an app, hire someone, or test an idea. And sometimes it doesn't work. That's okay. Failure can provide valuable information. Maybe customers weren't interested. Maybe costs were higher than expected. Maybe an assumption was wrong. The entrepreneur can adjust, try again, or move in a completely different direction.
In that sense, markets are not simply places where people buy and sell things. They are enormous discovery processes. A rising price might signal that something is becoming scarce. A long waiting list might reveal unmet demand. A frustrated customer might point toward an opportunity. A new technology might make an old way of doing things obsolete. Entrepreneurs pay attention to these signals and connect dots that others haven't connected yet.
What Does This Look Like at Brookfield Academy?
At Brookfield Academy, entrepreneurship isn't just something students read about in an economics textbook. They get to experience it. In AP Microeconomics, students develop business plans. They form companies and develop their products and services from scratch. And then present their plans to loan officers from local banks. In our entrepreneurship course, they think about products, customers, costs, competition, and the uncertainty that comes with making decisions without knowing exactly how things will turn out. Our middle school students go through something similar with the famous BAME program (Brookfield Academy Mini Economy).
And entrepreneurship doesn't stop at the classroom door. Student clubs sell products and organize donut sales. Students develop ideas, figure out what people are willing to buy, calculate their costs, and discover what happens when reality doesn't quite match the plan. These experiences may look like small business exercises, but they teach something much bigger: how to think independently, respond to information, and take an idea seriously enough to test it.
Elisabeth Wilson, a senior economics student and member of a student business featured on Project Pitch-It, experienced this firsthand while developing her junior-year economics business plan for TailSpark Toys. She learned that even seemingly minor expenses, like printer ink, can affect the economics of a product. But her biggest lesson went beyond calculating costs: "I learned that to succeed you need to listen to the market, consider what it actually requires, and adjust when things do not go as planned."
That's a lesson worth teaching every student. You might love your idea. You might think it's brilliant. You might spend months developing it. But eventually, the customer gets a vote. Students take risks, face challenges, sometimes fail and shed tears. But it’s a lesson that all of them learn from and cherish.
For parents and teachers, this raises an interesting question: How do we encourage entrepreneurship in young people?
Perhaps it's not by giving them another program telling them how to become entrepreneurs. Perhaps it's by creating environments where they are free to try. Our job isn't necessarily to tell that student which opportunity to pursue. Our job is to give them the freedom, knowledge, and confidence to discover it for themselves.
That's why entrepreneurship matters. Not just for business, but for education. When students learn to identify problems, test ideas, respond to feedback, take reasonable risks, and turn ideas into action, they're learning something far more valuable than how to start a company.
They're learning how to see possibilities that don't yet exist.
