Babson College president Stephen Spinelli turns the idiom “practise what you preach” on its head; he preaches what he’s practised.

As the leader of the top graduate school for entrepreneurship in the United States, Dr Spinelli knows something about starting businesses. At 23, his college football coach in Massachusetts, who had an entrepreneurial bent and an eye for talent, invited him to work for him in a private nursing home he ran in the mid-western town of Clinton, Iowa.