Capturing the ‘entrepreneurship phenomenon’ in the classroom through co-creating content with the students

Abstract

Facilitating the subject ‘Entrepreneurship Education’ at higher education can be challenging as it requires a multi-disciplinary approach and a keen focus on the changing business environment. It also makes capturing entrepreneurship as a ‘phenomenon’ a daunting task. Various nuances around ‘entrepreneurship as a phenomenon’ such as defining entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial characteristics and roles, understanding the role of entrepreneurial ecosystem, etc. are influenced by socio-economic and cultural contexts. Entrepreneurship education needs to take a due cognizance of the same by allowing the students to voice their own perceptions and opinions. Implicit entrepreneurship theory and effectuation are two different theories that focus on creating the content by asking the participants to use their own experiences, perceptions, and belief systems to understand the phenomenon holistically. The assumption here is that all the participants are part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and effective learning can come through active engagement and peer learning by all the participants together. There is very scant literature available on this topic and the present study attempts to bridge this gap by allowing students participation in creating the knowledge. It shows how an innovative class assignment using these theories encouraged the students to express ‘entrepreneurship as a phenomenon’ using their own thoughts, beliefs and experiences. The study was found effective on two levels: firstly, in building divergent thinking skills of the students and secondly in capturing various aspects of entrepreneurship from the students coming from diverse socio-economic backgrounds to make the subject knowledge more insightful.

Keywords

• Entrepreneurship education
• co-creation of content
• divergent thinking
• implicit theory
• Classroom Practice
• Curriculum Studies