With Greece tottering on the edge of bankruptcy, Spain reporting 20% unemployment and the financial prospects of Portugal and Italy looking shaky, Europe’s economic turnaround is far from certain. But, with the credibility of governments and banks still at a low, where do we turn for rescue? According to the World Entrepreneurship Forum think tank, “every problem will eventually be solved by an entrepreneur”, and judging by the growing number of entrepreneurship courses that the world’s major business schools offer to students, they seem to take the same view. But aren’t most entrepreneurs created in the front line of business rather than in a classroom?

According to Roger Mumby-Croft of Warwick Business School’s Enterprise Hub, a school’s role is not to create entrepreneurs out of thin air, but to release potential that is already there. And in more imaginative ways than simply lecturing at students. “We can help to develop key skills such as lateral thinking, objective research, communication and presentation,” he says, “but only if we use interactive teaching that treats participants as equals in the learning process.”

Faced with the fact that so many of the current problems were brought about by large multinationals rather than owner-managed businesses, several schools are now focusing their efforts on creating a new generation of corporate entrepreneurs or ‘intrapreneurs’ within the big company environment.

“It’s possible that entrepreneurial leadership is now even more important in large businesses than in smaller ones,” says Patrice Houdayer of EMLYON in France. “In times like these, big companies need the flexibility to adapt to shifting markets. Yet most only pay lip service to intrepreneurship because they fear it could mean a loss of control.”

At first this idea of developing in-house entrepreneurs might seem logical, as the key features of the entrepreneurial approach to business – commitment to growth, flexibility and innovation – are as relevant to the biggest multinationals as they are to start-ups. And wouldn’t the injection of a few mavericks into big company hierarchies help to cut through bureaucracy and revive the go-getting spirit that made the business successful in the first place? But wasn’t it mavericks like these that brought about the economic crisis in the first place?

Not so says Mumby-Smith, arguing that it’s uneducated and ungoverned risk-takers who create problems, rather than the products of a business school programme. “Our task is to create people and organisations that grasp the importance of managed risk-taking,” he says. “Businesses that understand where they need to be flexible and responsive and where they need to replace gambling with governance.”

Houdayer agrees but also argues in favour of creating control mechanisms around corporate entrepreneurs to rein in extreme behaviour. “While it’s essential to have an environment which fosters new ideas and approaches, it’s also essential to have rigorous checks and balances to avoid the kind of excesses that led to the global downturn.”

Another European school, Nyenrode, in the Netherlands, addresses the potential problem by trying to focus bothentrepreneurs and intrapreneurs on creating sustainable business, rather than focusing on short-term gains which can store up trouble for the future. Taco van Someren, who heads the school’s programmes in this area, accepts that sustainability has had to take a back seat during the downturn, but is adamant that it will be back with a vengeance within three years. And, as he tells his students, that will mean those organisations which ignore it could find themselves in serious trouble shortly afterwards.

Despite their enthusiasm for all things entrepreneurial, schools recognise that not every organisation will be ready to accept entrepreneurs within their existing hierarchies, mainly because they are nervous that they could engender change for change’s sake and undermine existing business. Bülent Gögdün of the ESMT business school in Germany sympathises with this worry but suggests that it can be addressed with a ‘dual stream’ approach – leaving the core of the business untouched and creating ‘silos’ where new ideas could be developed and turned into products or services. Those that proved commercially viable would be brought under the main corporate umbrella.

He points to Lufthansa’s successful development of a low-cost airline as an example of this idea in action.

Whether big business is ready to embrace intrapreneurs is not clear, but business schools seem set on creating such individuals for when they do.