The Financial Times’ Global MBA and Executive MBA rankings have put Spain on the top when it comes to producing the world’s most successful MBA entrepreneurs.
The revelation came after the Financial Times conducted an analysis of full-time and executive MBA alumni who graduated in 2013 from top-ranked business schools.
Spanish institutions were found to provide the best in entrepreneurship, followed by Switzerland with the US coming in third.
The criteria for the rankings was based on factors like the proportion of students who set up a company after graduation, the percentage who raise equity, and those companies who are still in business three years later.
These findings opposed previous research conducted by the Financial Times in June, which ranked the US as the top location for providing MBA programmes for entrepreneurship because of the country’s leading individual programmes such as those at Stanford Graduate School of Business and FW Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College.
June’s analysis revealed that US programmes accounted for 15 of the 25 ranked, including the top seven slots.
Despite the programmes on offer in the US, its schools produce fewer entrepreneurs than Spain and Switzerland.
Only 19 per cent of US alumni started a company, compared with 26 per cent of those who studied in Spain.
In other revelations, the Financial Times found that less than a quarter of entrepreneurs set up overseas companies. Approximately 20 per cent of those chose to set up shop in the US and 10 per cent in the UK.
However, the countries with the highest proportion of foreign entrepreneurs were Hong Kong with 62 per cent, Singapore at 53 per cent and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with 47 per cent.
Additional findings revealed that South Africa’s full-time and executive MBA students had the highest rate of start-up creation at about 40 per cent, with many of the successful graduates emerging from South African schools like the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science at the University of Pretoria.
However, while South Africa topped the ratings in terms of start-up creation, it could not take a top position amongst Spain, Switzerland and the US in terms of overall entrepreneurial success due to the limitations on domestic funding.
Mexican and Hong-Kong MBA students were found to be the most entrepreneurial, with 34 per cent and 32 per cent respectively setting up their own business. European entrepreneurial spirit was largest in British graduates at 30 per cent.
