Entrepreneurship Education

New Perspectives on Entrepreneurship Education

Paul Jones, Gideon Maas, Luke Pittaway, Gerard McElwee

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787142817
• eBook ISBN: 9781787430303
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Education
• Index: Business

Universities globally are under pressure from an expanding range of stakeholders to provide enterprise education and support to students. Enterprise education had become a research domain in itself and an increasingly important aspect of UK universities' curricular. Within the UK, policymakers consider enterprise education, and the skills it develops, as increasing student's employability skills, regardless of what their primary subject of study is, and thereby assisting them in gaining employment upon. Despite this growth, there is ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education and there are calls for further evidence to validate its impact. This book meets that call in providing further evidence for best practice and successful deployment. Authors provide evidence to inform the entrepreneurial education discipline in terms of best practice, success stories and identify its future direction for key stakeholders. The book concludes with a summary from the authors which will analyse and contrast the emergent themes identified in each chapter.

PART I
STUDIES OF THE IMPACT OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION UPON STUDENT COMMUNITIES

LEARNING TO EVOLVE: INCREASING ENTREPRENEURIAL SELF-EFFICACY AND PUTTING THE MARKET FIRST

Dermot Breslin

ABSTRACT

Interpreting venture creation as a process of learning allows potential entrepreneurs to help themselves, and develop the skills and competences they required for business. The effectiveness of a learning-based approach to enterprise education is explored here. This study examines changing perceptions and performances of business students as they complete a new venture creation module. In this course, students are invited to interpret the start-up process as a process of learning, using an evolutionary metaphor. Several key findings were revealed. First, the evolutionary learning approach increased the self-efficacy of participants, as their self-belief and confidence in their ideas and abilities increased over the course of the module. This increase was even more pronounced within a sub-group who started their businesses within six months of completion of the course. Second, by adopting the ‘learning to evolve’ approach, participants increasingly focused changes made to their ideas on marketing-related issues. The more the individual focused on marketing as a source of change, the better the improvement in quality of the idea. This research has implications for enterprise educators and practicing entrepreneurs. When one shifts the focus of attention to the external world, and when changes are driven by signals from that external world, the quality of emerging opportunities is enhanced. Moreover, self-efficacy increases as nascent entrepreneurs gain confidence and self-belief both in their ideas, and the skills needed to make them happen. The shift in perspective towards the external market is the key driver in triggering the entrepreneurial process. The approach thus promotes the notion that the entrepreneurship option is open to all who can ‘learn to evolve’.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial learning; evolutionary approach; entrepreneurial self-efficacy; market-focused approach; enterprise education

INTRODUCTION

A key goal of enterprise educators is to teach students to think and behave as entrepreneurs as they navigate the business start-up process. Given the dynamic nature of such cognitions and behaviours, ‘learning to learn’ becomes a critical competence of aspiring entrepreneurs (Gartner, 1989). The entrepreneurial process includes interconnected activities of discovering and exploiting opportunities (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000), and scholars have conceptualised both in terms of cycles of learning (Cope, 2005; Deakins & Freel, 1998; Gartner, 1984; Gibb, 1997; Kirzner, 1997; Politis, 2005; Tang, Kacmar, & Busenitz, 2012). Interpreting venture creation as a process of learning thus allows potential entrepreneurs to help themselves and develop the specific skills and competences they need for their businesses. In this chapter, the effectiveness of such a learning-based approach to enterprise education is explored. This study examines changing perceptions and performances of 88 undergraduate business students as they complete a final level new venture creation module. In this course, students are invited to interpret the start-up process as a process of learning, using an evolutionary metaphor (Breslin & Jones, 2012, 2014; Breslin, 2015).

Previous lab-based research (Breslin & Jones, 2014) has shown that when prompted to interpret change in evolutionary terms, participants focused more on external factors, such as the market. In viewing this process as an evolutionary one, embedded within a wider ecology of customers and competitors, the ‘learning to evolve’ approach thus forces the entrepreneur to take a broader, externally focused perspective (Breslin, 2015). The study outlined in this chapter has two key objectives. First it seeks to build on the findings of this previous lab-based work and to investigate driving forces behind changes made to business ideas as they developed over a 10-week period. If these evolutionary entrepreneurs focused more on marketing-related changes to their business over time, what impact does this have on the quality of the emerging opportunities? Second, the study aims to explore the changing self-efficacy of students as they gained mastery over the ‘learning to evolve’ approach. Self-efficacy is the personal belief an individual has in their skills and abilities to initiate a task and lead it to success (Bandura, 1997). Collins, Smith, and Hannon (2006) however point to a gap in research which examines the impact of entrepreneurship education programs on developing entrepreneurial intention in university students. This study therefore seeks to address this gap. As participants begin to view the venture creation process through an evolutionary lens, does this impact upon their self-belief, confidence and changing perceptions of the quality of their ideas? Furthermore, does this build confidence in their ability to make the idea happen, and result in students actually starting their businesses? In summary, this research adds to the project which seeks to put forward the ‘learning to evolve’ as a higher level entrepreneurial heuristic underpinning the practice, and ultimately the success, of entrepreneurial learning.

The chapter is structured as follows. First a brief review of the literature on entrepreneurial learning is presented, followed by an overview of the evolutionary approach. The start-up process is viewed as a co-evolutionary system of evolving opportunities, and emerging skills and competences needed to exploit these over time. Next the research method and key findings of the study are put forward. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the theoretical implications of the findings for entrepreneurial learning, practical lessons to be drawn in practice and enterprise education.

ENTREPRENEURIAL LEARNING

Entrepreneurial learning is a core process in the birth, growth and ultimately survival of small businesses, and therefore if one learns how to think and behave like an entrepreneur, one can apply such skills across a range of situations. Shane and Venkataraman (2000, p. 218) defined entrepreneurship ‘as the scholarly examination of how, by whom, and with what effects opportunities to create future goods and services are discovered, evaluated, and exploited …. Consequently, the field involves the study of sources of opportunities; the processes of discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities; and the set of individuals who discover, evaluate, and exploit them’. This process of learning shapes both this discovery of opportunities, and their subsequent exploitation. Considering first opportunity discovery, some have conceptualised this process in terms of stages, including prior experience, scanning and search and the discovery of the opportunity itself (Fiet, 2002; Kirzner, 1997; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000; Tang et al., 2012). These ‘stages’ represent episodes in a cycle of learning (Kolb, 1985). First most scholars highlight the role played by prior experience and search (deliberate and/or accidental), and related development of knowledge by the entrepreneur. This knowledge is developed and stored as cognitive structures in the heads of entrepreneurs as they interact with the world around them (Baron, 2007; Fiet, 2002, 2007; Forbes, 1999; Kirzner, 1997; Mitchell et al., 2002; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). Cognitive processes then work on these structures to make connections and associations, in the discovery of opportunities (Kaish & Gilad, 1991; Shaver & Scott, 1991). So entrepreneurs process stored cognitive structures, by stretching, expanding or combining concepts (Baron & Ward, 2004; Baron, 2007; Mitchell et al., 2002; Ward, 2004) to generate new ideas. Business ideas are thus represented in the heads of entrepreneurs as cognitive concepts. A central process in opportunity discovery is therefore insight and creativity, in which unique associations are made between accumulated cognitive structures (Tang et al., 2012) or new-means ends relationships found (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). This process of ‘joining the dots’ is also connected with the notion of entrepreneurial alertness (Kirzner, 1997). Alertness thus involves both a process of positioning oneself in the right place to avail of market information (Kaish & Gilad, 1991), but of also making sense of that information through unique insight. Finally, some researchers consider how discovered opportunities are evaluated by the individual. Evaluation involves entrepreneurs assessing the viability and future potential of ideas (Tang et al., 2012), or sets of ideas (Hill & Birkinshaw, 2010). Discovery thus follows a cycle of experiential learning in which experiences are the basis for the generation of abstract cognitive ideas, which are subsequently evaluated and tested (Kolb, 1985).

The exploitation of ideas involves a further process of learning as the entrepreneur develops the skills and competences needed to make the idea happen. These include more routine functional skills such as developing marketing strategies, negotiating with investors, closing sales, managing employees, designing products etc. The entrepreneur also develops simple decision making tools or heuristics to deal with the ambiguities and uncertainties of the start-up process, which they develop to assist in the perception and interpretation of changes in the marketplace (Daft & Weick, 1984; Forbes, 1999). The entrepreneur learns these skills and competences through a process of ‘learning by doing’ as they launch a new venture, (Cope, 2005; Deakins & Freel, 1998; Gartner, 1984; Politis, 2005), with more successful entrepreneurial learning resulting in better adapted skills, heuristics and competences. Similarly, others refer to entrepreneurs acquiring entrepreneurial knowledge through the experiences of start-up (Deakins & Freel, 1998; Politis, 2005) as they discover and exploit opportunities. In this way, entrepreneurs learn through trial and error, learning from mistakes and interpreting feedback from the environment (Gibb, 1997). So entrepreneurs develop skills and competences to complete tasks in the production and delivery of products and services (Aldrich & Ruef, 2006) as they exploit opportunities over time (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000), and the entrepreneur acquires and develops these various knowledge components as the needs of the business dictate. Entrepreneurial learning is seen as the acquisition and development of entrepreneurial skills, heuristics and frameworks to meet the demands of the business. Furthermore, this process is practice-based, involving ‘lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• New Perspectives on Entrepreneurship Education
• Part I Studies of The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education Upon Student Communities
• Part II Novel Entrepreneurship Education Pedagogy
• Part III Entrepreneurship Education Intervention
• About the Editors
• About the Authors
• Index