It is a little more than 10 years since Sir Ken Robinson gave his TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talk, Do schools kill creativity? Forty million people have since watched him make what TED calls his “entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity”.

Sir Ken concluded his talk by saying: “Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth – for a particular commodity [academic excellence, particularly in maths].”

Earlier, he had argued: “We know three things about intelligence. One, it is diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain … intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain is not divided into compartments. In fact, creativity – which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. And the third thing about intelligence is, it is distinct.”

Intelligence, therefore, feeds into creativity and innovation, and the search is on for entrepreneurs able to scale up and employ more people at relatively high wages. US-based entrepreneur-focused non-profit the Kauffman Foundation, however, notes there have been long-term declines in business creation and slow growth that have led to a “startup deficit”, although it was hopeful “over the long term that the rate of entrepreneurship will rebound” as barriers fall.

Still, the question remains, why have entrepreneur rates continued to fall even though barriers have also been falling over the past 20 years? And there is a wider question that harks back to Sir Ken’s insights a decade earlier. As a Nordic Innovation report identified a few years back: “Entrepreneurship is the individual’s ability to translate ideas into action. It encompasses creativity, innovativeness and risk-taking, as well as ability to plan and direct action towards the achievement of goals.”

If you wait until people are nearly through a school or university designed to make them jump through hoops of exams, and then saddle them with debts and a workplace with high youth unemployment and limited real-world social interaction, it can be hard to form a business idea and find and build a team to execute the idea.

There is some good work being done on this challenge. Sherry Coutu, founder and executive chairman of school entrepreneurship scheme Founders4Schools, in a TEDx talk asked: “I don’t understand how people can come out of school prepared for jobs that were, rather than jobs that will be.”

Her work encourages entrepreneurs to go to school to inspire the next generation, while a Finnish project, Me & My City, won the 2014 World Innovation Summit for Education for its exceptional impact on sixth grade students trying out potential careers.

But, at an even earlier age, others are trying to encourage kids. Andrew Gaule, our partner who leads the Global Corporate Venturing Academy, has run an UpStart4StartUps programme in London, UK, for pre-teens, including his daughters, “to develop young people to become entrepreneurs and to support charitable causes”.

And, rather than try to unlearn the process that “kills creativity” there are pilot projects in finding a new form of education. In the US, the Bowman School was founded by Silicon Valley-based entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, such as Guy Kawasaki and Heidi Mason, based on “the principles of Montessori elementary education”, and in the UK the Green House project for “raising change agents who care for themselves, care for each other and care for the land” has been crowdfunding to expand to an earlier-years’ cohort.

The number-one challenge in venture capital, whatever the source of the money – corporate, university, government or independent – is to source quality dealflow. Falling rates of entrepreneurship cannot be helpful in this context.

In addition, while there are increasing amounts of information on how to be a good entrepreneur, a glance at most of it indicates it comes back to translating “ideas into action” and leading a team.

Disclosure: The writer is an unpaid adviser to the directors of the Green House, and his son has applied for the next semester