Teaching Entrepreneurship

Teaching Entrepreneurship advocates teaching entrepreneurship using a portfolio of practices, including play, empathy, creation, experimentation, and reflection. Together these practices help students develop the competency to think and act entrepreneu

In developing the first signature pedagogy for entrepreneurship education, Colin Jones unites the contexts of enterprise and education at the intersection of scholarship, transformational learning and student engagement. Good teaching for entrepreneurship is shown to emerge both from the educator and the students’ interest. For the educator, a process of scholarly leading is required to support student interest – from the alternate perspective, students require a willingness to welcome uncertainty and challenge the existing boundaries to effectively develop a capacity for self-negotiated action.

“Entrepreneurship that is something you learn in practice”. “Entreprene- ship is learning by doing”. This is often heard when you tell others that you teach entrepreneurship, but maybe entrepreneurship is more “doing by learning”. Nevertheless, in entrepreneurship practice and theory are int- woven. For this reason the Learning Cycle introduced by Kolb (1984) is an often used teaching approach. According to this Learning Cycle there are four phases (“cycle”) that are connected: 1. Concrete experience (“doing”, “experiencing”) 2. Reflection (“reflecting on the experience”) 3. Conceptualization (“learning from the experience”) 4. Experimentation (“bring what you learned into practice”) In teaching you can enter this cycle at any stage, depending on the students. And that brings us to the different types of students. Based on Hills et al. (1998) a plethora of student groups can be distinguished (of course this list is not exhaustive), e.g: Ph.D. students, who do a doctoral programme in Entrepreneurship; the emphasis is on theory/science. DBA students, who do a doctoral programme that is, in comparison to the Ph.D. more practice oriented. MBA students, who take entrepreneurship as one of the courses in their programme. Most of the time MBA students are mature students, who after some work experience return to the university; the programme is practice oriented.

“It stretches no point to suggest that creativity, innovation and risk-taking will decide our future societal prosperity. We cannot spread those values too widely, so having taught engineering faculty in their first book, these authors now aim to boost the spirit across all disciplines. What a great success for all of us if they succeed.” – Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., president of Purdue University and former governor of Indiana Despite the relevancy of the entrepreneurial mindset for all career paths, only a small percentage of the higher education student population takes part in entrepreneurially-minded learning opportunities. This gap can be attributed to several factors. From a program perspective, many degrees are already at credit capacity which allows limited room in the existing curriculum to add new courses. From a student perspective, entrepreneurship education is thus positioned as optional and requires extra time (and in some cases tuition) to do so. Finally, from an educator perspective, the majority of faculty members across the university have not been trained in entrepreneurship and may not know where to start. Teaching the Entrepreneurial Mindset Across the University: An Integrative Approach overcomes these challenges by providing higher education faculty with a toolkit, including tips and strategies, to integrate the entrepreneurial mindset into existing courses regardless of discipline. The book is broken into three core parts: Motivation: The importance of the entrepreneurial mindset for all students is established; Design: The Entrepreneurial Mindset Teaching Blueprint is introduced as a tool for integrating entrepreneurially-minded curricular learning experiences within existing courses; Application: Example entrepreneurially-minded curriculum from across the university are provided. By integrating the entrepreneurial mindset across the curriculum, students from all disciplinary backgrounds will be better prepared to enter the workforce, solve complex social issues, and leverage entrepreneurial thinking in their everyday lives. This book is meant for educators who want to make an impact and truly prepare graduates for the real world.

24 Steps to Success! Disciplined Entrepreneurship will change the way you think about starting a company. Many believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but great entrepreneurs aren’t born with something special – they simply make great products. This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework that any industrious person can learn and apply. You will learn: Why the “F” word – focus – is crucial to a startup’s success Common obstacles that entrepreneurs face – and how to overcome them How to use innovation to stand out in the crowd – it’s not just about technology Whether you’re a first-time or repeat entrepreneur, Disciplined Entrepreneurship gives you the tools you need to improve your odds of making a product people want. Author Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as well as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. For more please visit http://disciplinedentrepreneurship.com/

This book provides engineering faculty members and instructors with a base understanding of why the entrepreneurial mindset is important to engineering students and how it can be taught. It helps advance entrepreneurship education for all engineering students, and equips educators with tools and strategies that allow them to teach the entrepreneurial mindset. Divided into four parts, this book explores what the entrepreneurial mindset is, and why it is important; shows how to get started and integrate the mindset into existing coursework so that curricula can focus on both technical/functional concepts and entrepreneurial ones as well; guides readers through the growing multitude of conferences, journals, networks, and online resources that are available; and provides solid examples to get the reader started. This book is an important resource for engineering educators as they learn how to remain competitive and cutting-edge in a field as fast-moving and dynamic as engineering.

Building on the success of the first volume of Teaching Entrepreneurship, this second volume features new teaching exercises that are adaptable and can be used to teach online, face to face or in a hybrid environment. In addition, it expands on the five practices of entrepreneurship education: the practice of play, the practice of empathy, the practice of creation, the practice of experimentation, and the practice of reflection.

You begin the course with an exploration of what it means to be an entrepreneur: what an entrepreneur does, what he/she acts like, values, and achieves. The first lessons will give students an overview of what it means to start, run, and own a business-the risks, rewards, needs, and expectations.