Guiding students towards an entrepreneurial mindset (original) (raw)
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Unleashing the potential of university entrepreneurship education
New England Journal of Entrepreneurship, 2019
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the ways in which traditional views of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship have inadvertently limited entrepreneurship education. The authors propose a broader view of what it means to be an entrepreneur and describe a disruptive approach to entrepreneurship education, one that centers around building students’ entrepreneurial mindset. By tapping into students’ “inner entrepreneur” and nurturing their abilities to think and act creatively, embrace failure, effect change and be resilient, the authors are preparing them for the challenges of the twenty-first century labor market. Design/methodology/approach This is a perspective paper about how the traditional views of entrepreneurship education may be limiting its potential to create entrepreneurial college graduates set to take on twenty-first century careers. Findings Teaching the entrepreneurial mindset and process will allow us, as educators, to best prepare our students for the co...
2019
How ready our future graduates are, depends on how higher educational institutions best prepare them for the challenges of the future workplace, and the community at large. With an ever-increasing number of new graduates entering the workforce, it becomes almost impossible for every graduate to find employment unless they are equipped with entrepreneurial skills that will elevate their capacity to become selfemployed. With this in mind, the Entrepreneurship Accelerator Project (EAP), a tailor-made capstone module was designed for final year students in a private university, with the aim of producing work-ready graduates with entrepreneurial skills. This study will assess how effective the EAP programme is, in developing students’ entrepreneurial skills and in preparing them to seize business opportunities, take risks, think strategically, and acquire other future work-ready skills set. The study is based on Schumpeter’s entrepreneurial theory of innovation, Kolb’s Experiential Theor...
Rethinking Entrepreneurship and University Education
Academia Letters, 2021
There is an ongoing debate around the world on the role of universities in producing employable graduates. Some argue that there is a need to focus on skills that the industry needs, with an emphasis on STEM and professional courses that offer hands-on skills easily transferable into the market. There is also a push towards placing more emphasis on two-year technical college programs. Others have asked that institutions focus on training students in entrepreneurial skills that they can use to employ themselves upon graduation instead of seeking employment from the government or industry. While all these arguments are valid, they reflect an emphasis on a single variable embedded within a diverse set of options. What if, for instance, instead of seeing university education as skill training for a specific job, we see it as an engagement that involves skills that not only produce employable graduates but also entrepreneurs and well-rounded citizens who adapt to the ever-changing world of work? Further, what if we started looking at what we consider to be employable skills from a broader perspective? Education is about knowledge and skills, about graduates with the knowledge to theorize about human life and phenomena, graduates with skills to provide practical solutions for current and future challenges. Without thinkers and theorizers, we cannot imagine a world outside of the immediate. If we train students on skills of repairing a tractor that is based on today's thinking, for instance, how do we prepare them for the tractor of the future that might be self-driving and using solar power instead of diesel or petrol? Here are a few thoughts on entrepreneurship as part of education that is beyond skill training. Entrepreneurship has become a staple in many conversations, strategies, and even practices in many boardrooms, political meetings, and businesses. When people talk about business success, they talk about people who are entrepreneurs; they talk about Uber, Netflix, Airbnb, etc., as entrepreneurial companies that changed the way business is done in their
2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings
Liz Nilsen is a Senior Program Officer at VentureWell, a national higher education network that cultivates inventions and technical innovations to improve life for people and the planet. At VentureWell, Liz provides leadership to the Epicenter Pathways to Innovation initiative, an effort to engage with a cohort of colleges and universities to fully embed innovation and entrepreneurship in undergraduate engineering education. She also works on the development of new programs for VentureWell. Liz previously led several STEM initiatives, including those associated with Penn State and Virginia Tech. She earned her BA from Stanford University and an MBA from Northeastern University.
2017
The potential of young people to develop their own industrial, commercial or social projects and, thereby, to innovate and think “out-of-the-box” is, more than ever, understood as a survival skill to face the current socioeconomic context. Accordingly, since the beginning of the third millennium, the number of entrepreneurship education initiatives have growing fast. Entrepreneurship education is essential not only to shape the mind-sets of young people but also to provide the skills, knowledge and attitudes that are nuclear to developing an entrepreneurial culture. For higher education, this “new” challenge is particularly high, as the ultimate step in the academic career. Notwithstanding the importance given to entrepreneurship in higher education, some questions remain to explain. This paper intends to analyze how entrepreneurship is defined in the learning outcomes proposed in the new study programs submitted to quality accreditation in Portugal, since 2009. In the scope of a qu...
Enhancing Entrepreneurship and Skills Development in Higher Education
Atlantis Press, 2023
Improving entrepreneurship has become a multi-level social and economic imperative, since it is an effective approach to inspire individuals to develop social and economic added value that benefits society as a whole. Entrepreneurial education has become the age's means of changing the culture of individuals and society, as well as their ways of thinking, to become entrepreneurs, who have the will and ability to transform new ideas or inventions into successful commercial projects, opening up new horizons to consider knowledge management. The main question is therefore: What needs to happen in education in order to provide a good preparation for entrepreneurship? How will the university be able to adopt new techniques in order to put over an entrepreneurial culture in its students and assist them in translating academic knowledge into real results? Entrepreneurship is defined by the traits of persons who have been labelled as entrepreneurs. These people are distinguished by their capacity to innovate, take chances, be creative, identify possibilities, and benefit from them. Many economists believe that entrepreneurship plays an important role in generating competitive societal value. In this research we will discuss how effective entrepreneurship education is and what can we do to promote entrepreneurship in higher education and what skills do students need to be an entrepreneur, and presenting some recommendations and solutions to enhancing entrepreneurship education and skills development in higher education. Therefore, in this paper we give an overview of the current state of knowledge regarding the entrepreneur profile, as well as a set of activities that may be used in higher education to strengthen the entrepreneurship culture. Research Contribution: It's time for entrepreneurial education through university as an entrepreneurial institution, not every undergraduate has to know to be an entrepreneur, but to be an intrapreneur with an entrepreneurial mindset. Higher education institutions have a role in promoting the culture of entrepreneurship and enhance students to create an entrepreneurial opportunity.