Team Academy and Entrepreneurship Education

Elinor Vettraino, Berrbizne Urzelai, Elinor Vettraino, Berrbizne Urzelai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367755911
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000534917
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Within Entrepreneurship Education, Team Academy (TA) is seen as an innovative pedagogical model that enhances social connectivity, as well as experiential, student-centred, and team-based learning. It also creates spaces for transformative learning to occur.

This first book of the Routledge Focus on Team Academy book series examines the place and purpose of the TA model in entrepreneurship education, and indicates how and why the model has grown in popularity and interest over the last three decades.

This book is aimed at academics, practitioners, and learners engaged in the TA methodology, pedagogy, and model, as well as those interested in the area of entrepreneurial team learning. Readers will be inspired to innovate in their delivery methodologies and to explore learning-by-doing approaches to creating value. The book also aims to challenge the discourse around entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activities, offering insights, research, stories, and experiences from those learning and working in the TA approach.

1 Team Academy Movement

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163091-2

Its Roots and Evolution

Johannes Partanen and Hanna Waldén

At the time of this writing, the story of Tiimiakatemia will soon reach the age of 30. It started as an experiment with one teacher in his classroom with 24 students. As Johannes Partanen (2020) put it “Tiimiakatemia wasn’t created by planning. Instead, it was created with continuous experiments.”

During subsequent decades, Tiimiakatemia has evolved into a learning model and a movement that has created team entrepreneurship around the world. Its applications can be seen from primary schools to universities, from small companies to corporations. Wherever there are people doing work and learning together, the ideas of team learning and team entrepreneurship can take place and grow.

The core ideology of Tiimiakatemia is rooted in its Leading Thoughts. They are fundamental beliefs about humanity, communality, creation of something new, and applying ideas to practice. Around this core are the models and tools of learning that hundreds and thousands of team learners use to challenge themselves and each other every day. They have been originally developed at the heart of Finland in Tiimiakatemia. From there, they have spread around the world, at the same time being co- and further developed with hundreds of passionate team advocates who see the power and impact of team learning and team entrepreneurship.

In this chapter, we’ll travel to the birthplace of Tiimiakatemia and some of its core development phases. The first part explores Tiimiakatemia from the perspective of innovation. The second part explores the core model of creating team entrepreneurship, The Rocket Model – the roots and core idea of the model. The last part creates an overview of the system of coaching team coaches that is an essential element in rooting and spreading the ideas and learning methods into different communities and cultures.

Tiimiakatemia Is an Innovation

Working with innovations is about the in-born human desire to do history. It is about the yearning to leave a positive mark on the world. The value created by an idea belongs to those who make it a reality, as ideas by themselves and separate from their realization do not have much value. For Johannes Partanen (2020), ideas and innovations are not the same:

I’ve always been enthusiastic about ideas and innovations. However, sometimes I’m irritated by people who do not make a difference between them. Innovation needs enthusiastic people who, as a community, create and use ideas and inventions. Environments that lock up great ideas and surround them with walls are less innovative than open ones.

Pablo Picasso used to say that inspiration surprises him in the middle of his work. That is why we shouldn’t just stand and wait for inspiration and good ideas. We need work that creates space for them.

Good ideas are not born by sitting in your summer cottage in isolation and trying to think big thoughts. Instead, we need connections and networks. And we need lots of ideas to create a singular good one. The secret of creating ideas is about connecting the pieces together with others and with ideas from others.

Resistance is the best way to recognize an idea that is truly worth something. Strangely, no-sayers become valuable promoters of good ideas! Anita Roddick, one of the legendary role models of Tiimiakatemia, created and lived a success story by having an idea about sustainability. She said that none of the business teachings helped her in her business. She was driven by (then) a weird idea and the will to change things for the better.

When looking at good ideas and innovations from the perspective of human history, one can say that our history was transformed by the transition from hunter–gatherer society into agricultural society. Hunters live in small groups that are not strongly connected to each other. In comparison, agriculture created groups of thousands and tens of thousands of people. This allowed good ideas to spread from person to person.

Ideas Develop Slowly

It is a common misconception that an idea is created in a short amount of time. There are, of course, fast inventions that get all the publicity. But, most of the ideas are created over long periods of time. An innovation expert, Steven Johnson (2012), calls this process Slow Hunch. For example, it took 50 years for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to develop into a new scientific theory. By realizing the slow development of ideas, we can undersign the following motto attributed to Thomas Edison; the ideas that come to fruition are made up of 99% work and 1% inspiration. In other words, it is a long journey.

Not everyone has the material luxury of Darwin to spend his or her time breaking down the walls of known truths. Most of us live in an everyday world where we are constantly under pressure and with loads of responsibilities. Tim Berners-Lee invented The World Wide Web. His Slow Hunch took him 10 years to mature. For us, the development of Tiimiakatemia took 25 years. And the development is still continuing!

The New Definition of Innovation

In everyday talk, when people talk about innovations, they actually mean inventions. The focus tends to be on clever thinking, imagination, and creativity. It is all about inventing. But, as Denning and Dunham (2010) propose: what if we are wrong? Could it be that an invention does not bring forth innovation? Would it be possible, that despite a great number of ideas the number of innovations created in the world is small, we are unable to make a difference between invention and innovation?

Denning and Dunham (2010, p. 269) define the concept of innovation in a new way: “innovation is the adoption of new practice in a community.” The key to success is adoption. So, if you really want an innovation, not just an invention, you have to focus on the adoption. This rule helps us to create a clear distinction between the two concepts. Invention is about creating ideas, processes, and methods. They become innovative after they are adopted. Innovation by itself is the adoption process!

Part of the innovation is also the idea of community. It encompasses the people who change their ways of working or doing things (practices). How big is this community? The truth is, that most innovations are done in small groups. Tiimiakatemia is an example of this: it has solid learning practices that can be said to be an innovation. The challenge of an innovator is to make people change their practices together and incorporate new ones. People have to be motivated. Resistance must be understood and faced upfront. To get things done and adoption completed, people will also need new skills. All in all, success depends on three factors: domain expertise, social interaction, and recognizing opportunities.

The Practices of Innovation

The current education system does not produce results in the field of innovations. The system is based on a belief that one first needs to have understanding before doing something practical. The assumption is that the students will learn the practice afterwards. We reformers of education try to point out that this process happens the opposite way: one can only gain understanding after doing something. This is the entrepreneurial way. We need more practice in school settings if we want to educate innovative people and be innovative.

Denning and Dunham (2010) present a practical innovation framework that comprises eight practices. We believe that it serves as a good start for transforming schools and companies to become more innovative. And we have to admit that in Tiimiakatemia we have been using all of them unintentionally during its almost 30-year history!

Eight Practices: Reflections on the Development of Tiimiakatemia from Founder Johannes Partanen

The first practice is sensing. It can be demonstrated with personal experience. I have been working in the field of education for over 20 years. Back then I started to have suspicions about the way marketing and business management was taught in schools. I felt that it was too theoretical and abstract. When progressive educators started to propose that universities should provide more practical education, I started sensing. I began experimenting with ideas that had been maturing in our minds.

It didn’t take long for me to move into the second practice of envisioning. I started to observe the world around me. Also, I started to read a lot. A new mission of transforming university education to more practical and entrepreneurial ways of working started to form in my thinking. As my process of change went on, I invented and built a story about a fantastic Trip Around the World. The idea of this story was simple: by working and studying hard, we can have an around-the-world trip that most people only dream of. I published a Manifest and enough students, a full classroom, joined in. Together we formed a community around this story, and this became Our Story.

The third practice – offering – provided more depth and understanding to the story. Creating and offering for us was manifested as steps that we needed to take to do the Trip Around the World. The previous practices helped us to do that: we had discussions on the Manifest: do you want to travel around the world and learn some marketing while doing that? It cata-lysed our thinking and empowered us. This practical, open proposal provided us a roadmap on how to get from here to there. And it gave us clues on how to avoid pitfalls on the way.

To move from thinking and planning, we needed adoption. That is the fourth practice. Adoption of an idea is easier if one has a roadmap or a model that shows the way the community has to travel. At the same time, people create their shared language that helps everyone to understand each other. Also, to have adoption, one needs allies as there sure will be those who oppose the new idea. I was fortunate to have my own company that already had a wide business network. It provided us support in the beginning.

To keep the adoption process going forward, one needs to have a demonstration project that can show others that the idea is credible and that it can create results. These projects provide evidence. In the case of Tiimiakatemia, we had three big projects:

• The first one, The City of Human Smile (fin. Ihmiskasvoinen kaupunki) was done in cooperation with Jyväskylä Congress to improve customer service in a wide variety of local companies. It ran for three years. During that time, the City of Jyväskylä had its own pedestrian street that functioned as the high street of the city.
• We negotiated with the city officials and Tiimiakatemia became the main marketing developer of the street’s marketing. Thus, the second project was named as Development of Pedestrian Street of City of Jyväskylä. Our teampreneurs worked a lot on that!
• The third project was Neste Rally Finland. Then (and also now) legendary rally driver Simo Lampinen wanted to use the pedestrian street as part of the rally carnival. It became one of the biggest event management projects of Tiimiakatemia at that time.

We got publicity for all of these projects. We gained confidence. We demonstrated to ourselves and everyone else that our idea was good, and it could create positive outcomes in terms of learning marketing in practice and benefiting the local business community.

The fifth practice is sustaining. After adoption, one needs to make the innovation sustainable and stick to the culture. This phase is extremely challenging to innovate as in most cases people have to face all kinds of setbacks. To push through this phase, one should focus on four areas: (1) integrate the practice into the operating environment; (2) make it possible for people to use the practice; (3) support the practice; and (4) face and deal with the resistance that the practice will eventually face.

During the sustaining phase, Tiimiakatemia was (and Tiimiakatemia by Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences still is) part of formal education institution. We needed to create a curriculum that was suitable for the project and team learning. I spent hundreds of hours creating it. To create a flexible curriculum wasn’t easy as we had to take into account both the university’s and business world’s needs. Eventually, we succeeded in creating a good curriculum. This helped us to deal with the resistance of those who claimed that our approach wasn’t suitable for university education. Retrospectively thinking, I reckon back then we created many small inventions that we incorporated into our daily lives and the curriculum as well. For example, I created the concept of the Reading Programme and invented The Book Points of Tiimiakatemia.

The sixth practice is executing. The innovator has to earn the trust of others. He or she needs to be connected to a wide variety of networks. The members of these networks will only trust you if you can produce results. To Tiimiakatemia, our final, concrete result was our first Around the World Trip. We did it with the Round the World Team (that was the team’s name). With the trust and self-confidence we got from that, we were able to get our own facilities and build solid permanent team learning practices.

Sustainable innovations need leadership and because of that, the seventh practice is leading. According to Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, a leader is best when people barely k...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents Page
• List of Figures Page
• List of Tables Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• List of Contributors Page
• Introduction: Team Academy and Entrepreneurship Education
• 1 Team Academy Movement: Its Roots and Evolution
• 2 Tiimiakatemia Learning Culture: Design-Ethnographical Findings From Tiimiakatemia
• 3 Lost (and Found) in Translation
• 4 Innovation Within the Lines: Implementation of a Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship and Strategic Networking
• 5 The Joyous Envy of Seeing Real Action Experienced and Reflected Upon
• 6 Entrepreneurship Education in the United Kingdom: Traditional Teacher-Led Learning Approaches Versus the Experiential Team Academy Model
• 7 Team Coaching: A Review (on Where We Are Now) and Recommendations for Moving Forward the Practice
• 8 Why Team Academy?
• Concluding Thoughts: Contributors’ Conversation
• Index