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Supporting entrepreneurship education – or how to underpin the ‘very messy’
Alison Price
Entrepreneurship education is not easy; in fact, it is messy.
Entrepreneurship education rarely comes with a simple, discipline-related text book and an easy-to-use teacher’s manual. Nor is there is a simple module descriptor, programme outline and assessment method to suit your students. Traditional teaching methods of chalk-and-talk don’t develop the entrepreneurial behaviours and attitudes you are seeking, and your resulting innovations raise the eyebrows of colleagues. Your proposed assessment strategy draws from radically different approaches from outside the traditions of your disciplines, which raise concerns about quality and ‘what the external examiner will say’.
However once these hurdles can be overcome, and once your approach is validated, then the teaching itself is messy - guest speakers can let you down, or go ‘off message’. Half the students jump at the chance to do something different, while the other half resists working outside their expected norms of higher education. Often your lecture rooms feel like the worse place to learn in and your faculty time-tabler can’t respond to your vision of learning by wtrking with the needs of different groups, working in different spaces, at different times. (So you daren’t mention that your ideal would have been to have two student groups, from different disciplines and different faculties, working in mixed groups on projects.....) Then your approach of ‘real-time, real-life’ engagement with local organisations has created a queue outside your office of complaints (‘its not fair’) raising questions of parity within the learning experience. Then once again, you witness the ‘ideal’ of student team-work dissolving into warfare as it becomes clear that the working entrepreneurial vocabulary gained from TV Dragons and Apprentices has not been the sufficient underpinning that most students predicted. However with strong underpinning, eventually, the feedback is great; the students have visibly grown in knowledge, confidence and ability and the engagement with local organisations has created relationships that benefited all.
However as enterprise educators repeatedly wrestle with definitions and articulations of enterprise and entrepreneurship, as they work to convince colleagues, students and senior managers of the merit of their course content, approach and unique teaching style, they do not work alone. From our experience, the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship has provided the following key definitions:
The Enterprise Concept focuses upon the development of the enterprising person and the enterprising mindset through a demonstration of enterprising skills, behaviours and attitudes across a diversity of contexts. These include intuitive decision making, the capacity to make things happen autonomously, networking, initiative taking, opportunity identification, creative problem solving, strategic thinking, and self efficacy. The focus is on creating entrepreneurial ways of doing, thinking, feeling, communicating, organising and learning.
The Entrepreneurial Concept focuses upon the application of these enterprising skills and the entrepreneurial mindset in setting up a new venture, developing/growing an existing venture or designing an entrepreneurial organisation. The context might be business, social enterprise, charitable purpose, non-governmental organisations or public sector bodies.
Entrepreneurship ‘makes it happen’.
The Innovation Concept is the product of the Entrepreneurial Concept.
Innovation is defined as creating and exploiting opportunities for new ways of doing things resulting in better products and services, systems and ways of managing people and organisations. The successful pursuit of innovation is a function of individual enterprising endeavour and entrepreneurial organisation capacity.
Entrepreneurship is a necessary pre-condition for Innovation
National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship www.ncge.org.uk
These, together with the generic NCGE entrepreneurial learning outcomes (Gibb, 2005) create curriculum can be shaped that draws out the higher level and subject-specific skills and behaviours to create entrepreneurial learning outcomes in all students; supporting the development of an entrepreneurial mindset. This approach, while still incorporating the establishment of new ventures in business, also embraces opportunity-seeking and realisation, and the pursuit of entrepreneurial behaviour, along with the capacity to design and grow entrepreneurial organisations. An entrepreneurial mindset supports the individual in their future roles as consumer, family member and member of the community as well as worker, living in an increasingly globalised life-world of greater uncertainty and complexity (Gibb & Price 2010) as it creates an ability to apply learning – the enhanced capability to take action and behave – rather than purely upon the conventional delivery, testing and critical assessment of knowledge inputs.
It is therefore clear that great educators accept that great entrepreneurship teaching can be messy. The learning journey is shaped and supported by the university quality frameworks but where each student goes can be hard to predict and that can be an uncomfortable ride. This is what makes entrepreneurship education tough, complex and resource intensive, but critical to creating entrepreneurial graduates who are problem solvers, opportunity spotters and ready to face the challenges of their working lives. The structured ‘messiness’ of great entrepreneurship education creates freedom and creativity within our graduates and will underpin their careers, whether self-employed or shaping our organisations.
Support
If these challenges are the academic jigsaw that faces you currently, then you are in good company. The International Entrepreneurship Educators Conference (IEEC2010) attracts over 300 educators to share practice and exchange ideas – so put 1-3rd Sept in your diary and come to Cardiff ready to share your approaches, problems and solutions!
Or join the 55 educators who have committed to develop their teaching, practice and understanding by undertaking the International Entrepreneurship Educators Programme (IEEP). Our second cohort are currently exploring policy and practice as their 5th module before completing in June and we will be recruiting for 2010 shortly. Register your interest here http://www.ncge.com/communities/education/content/get/5 and you’ll get the latest details to help you deepen your teaching practice – however, you will still have to sort your own timetabling problems out!
Alison Price, Director of Educator Development, National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship, alison.price@ncge.org.uk