Teaching Entrepreneurship

“Entrepreneurship that is something you learn in practice”. “Entrepreneurship 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 interwoven. For this reason the Learning Cycle introduced by Kolb (1984) is an often used teaching approach.

In 1989 an informal cooperation was initiated between teachers from three HE institutions in Aarhus – the engineering college, the school of architecture’s institute of industrial design, and the business school, ASB. The teachers decided to set up mixed project groups for their students to carry out projects in what was then called “product development”. The cooperation was initiated quite informally and implemented by teachers. A teacher at the school of architecture came up with the idea; it seemed to him that his students lacked any understanding of what it was that made Danish design world-famous in the years between 1930 and 1970. His students considered themselves to be artists, working for the sake of art only, as he put it. What was missing was the traditional cooperation with furniture makers and production people in general, to make them realise what was the exact purpose of their own work. He therefore contacted the other two institutions, starting a cooperation still existing today; however no longer with ASB as a participant. Since then, so many things have happened that a brief outline is called for, to explain the situation which forms the background for the way the subject area entrepreneurship is being taught.

Tallinn School of Economics and Business Administration (TSEBA) at Tallinn University of Technology (TUT) is one of the most important institutions of higher education in economics and business administration in Estonia. TSEBA offers study programmers at Bachelor, Master’s and Doctoral level. Most of the economics courses to students in technical specialties at Tallinn University of Technology are provided by TSEBA. Programmes of the technical specialties at Tallinn University of Technology include two economic subjects such as (1) macro- and microeconomics and (2) business administration or entrepreneurship and business planning. The programme for students in technical specialties, as a rule on master’s degree level, contains entrepreneurship and business planning as a compulsory subject. The objective is to improve students’ knowledge about entrepreneurship, their skills for setting up a new business and to promote their entrepreneurial behaviour. Every year nearly 300 students take this course.

Promotion of enterprise is one the principal goals of economical growth, as the main tasks of the development of the country – training of human resources, encouragement of scientific and technological advancement as well as innovations and intellectualisation, expedition of the GDP and reduction of social-economical exclusion among regions. All this can be achieved by being engaged in the intense development of a network of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The development of SMEs is inseparable from commercialisation of innovations, cooperation between small and large companies as well as science and business, an effective infrastructure of business promotion, all of which influence economy and scientific development of the entire country. The primary conditions for SME development, as well as enterprise are knowledge, financial resources and an environment that initiates the growth and development of companies. Where knowledge is concerned, the emphasis should be on dissemination of information on entrepreneurship and access to training, consultancy and finance. These conditions are the essence of strategic development of SMEs.

The benefits of business planning and our abilities to teach it have recently been questioned from both practical and theoretical perspectives. Carrier (2005), claims that instead of conducting the traditional business planning, we should be more creative and, in teaching, too, focus more on inventing and developing business ideas. Hindle (1997) also criticises the standardised form of business planning and demands more flexibility and creativity instead of rigidity. The benefits of planning might actually rather be a myth than a fact, since planning does not necessarily improve performance. Tomas Karlsson (2005) argues that there is actually only a tenuous relationship between planning and performance. He also suggests that there is no evidence that the performance of a start-up business will improve or have more potential if the entrepreneur has made a business plan. The situation may even be the opposite, as Carter, Gartner and Reinold’s (1996) study indicated. Those having a business plan in their early start-up phase tended to stay in the intention phase longer than others. Thus, instead of helping to start the business, business planning seems rather to cause more or less delay in this process. Delmar and Shane (2004) also discovered that there was no significant relationship between the writing of a business plan and subsequent profitability. Regardless of these problems, recent Western reports indicate that the most popular approach to teaching entrepreneurship in universities is business planning (Menzies 2005).

The University of Twente is an entrepreneurial university; this means more than just having a focus on entrepreneurship, but in the framework of this paper we restrict ourselves to this (for a more elaborate discussion on the entrepreneurial university we refer to Shane 2004; Clark 1998; Bok 2003). Entrepreneurship is an essential and consistent element in the university policy since the early 1980s and concerns infrastructure, spin-offs, teaching and research. In this paper we first give an overview of the context and how it evolved in Twente, then we focus on the teaching programme and we close with some remarks.

This case illustrates the origin, implementation and Action Learning approach of the entrepreneurship support programme ROXI (acronym for ‘Rostocker Existenzgründer Initiative’). ROXI is administered by the Hanseatic Institute for Entrepreneurship and Regional Development (HIE-RO) at the University of Rostock in North-East Germany. ROXI offers extracurricular, supplementary training and support opportunities for students, graduates and university staff (cf. also Braun et al. 1998). Starting out as a mere training concept, the programme expanded its activities over the years to include pre-incubating work (e.g. sensitizing, motivating, informing), and into the start-up phase (e.g. coaching, consulting). The initiative for ROXI had already taken off in 1996 at the newly established Chair for Economics and Business Education of the University. Interviewed for this case, one of the originators tells:

“Major reasons to develop ROXI were the high regional unemployment rates and low economic growth at the time. Germany’s reunification in 1990 and the transformation from a socialist central planning system into a market economy did not only bring new freedom to Eastern Germany, but also meant a collapse of a sudden, non-competitive industry. We believed that our university and our chair had potential to become active for counter-actions. And we thought that an entrepreneurship training programme could be effective as a long-term-approach for regional growth and to fight unemployment. Our role models were entrepreneurship training programmes in developing and threshold countries, rather than university programmes. When we started to promote the idea for ROXI, such activities were still uncommon within a German university. Rostock was insofar no exception, but rather the rule.”

The Hämeenlinna sub region in Finland provides a stimulating environment for students and enterprises. Schools, universities, enterprises and Häme Development Centre Ltd. have built a network to promote entrepreneurial activities in the Hämeenlinna sub region. Entrepreneurship education is offered in state schools and vocational institutions. The objective is to promote and achieve entrepreneurship readiness at every level. Comprehensive and upper secondary schools foster entrepreneurship-friendly values and attitudes meaning to promote familiarity with entrepreneurship as a concept. Vocational institutes raise awareness for entrepreneurship as a career, teaching the basics of business operation. HAMK University of Applied Sciences and University of Tampere promote knowledge of and encourage entrepreneurship activities. Opportunities of the Hämeenlinna sub region are development of entrepreneurship education and also cooperation between regional business service organizations and regional vocational institutions and universities (Häme Development Centre Ltd.).

The development of entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurial skills is high on the list of regional targets. In the future Kainuu will need more and more entrepreneurial personalities who are creative, independent and selfconfident solution seekers possessing good taste, good social skills and a capacity for independent thinking. According to research, 49% of students studying at Kajaani University of Applied Sciences (UAS) are interested in entrepreneurial activities. To promote students’ entrepreneurship skills Kajaani UAS cooperates with pre-incubator Intotalo (http://www.intotalo.com). Intotalo is a special training organisation which prepares local young people for starting businesses of their own. The development of entrepreneurship within the local authority of Kajaani is the responsibility of the Kajaani Technology Centre Oy/Business Development Department. The Business Incubator (Entrepreneurship Training Centre) Intotalo is responsible for supporting and organising training for recently established and new businesses. Intotalo has been operating in Kajaani since the beginning of 2003. During the autumn of 2005 Intotalo also started operating in Vuokatti within the vicinity of Snowpolis.

A wide range of universities and colleges have recently invested in developing programs in entrepreneurship and technology management. Striving for entrepreneurial knowledge economies and supported politically, many institutions have successfully introduced a curriculum either in technology management or entrepreneurship. However, the examples of successful curricula, where entrepreneurship and technology management are integrated, are not so numerous. According to a 2001 European Commission’s report, there are major problems related to entrepreneurial education:

This chapter presents a case study of a module of a course within a tertiary education curriculum at the Institute of Economics and Management and is chosen to illustrate the way the learning cycle developed by Kolb is used to teach negotiation skills to entrepreneurs. The course is based on two assumptions:

Both entrepreneurial and virtual learning are phenomena that have risen in the turn of the twenty-first century. The needs of the society as well as the technical innovations have sped up their development. The European Union has set entrepreneurial practices as one of the central goals in active citizenship (the European Commission 1999). Finland is committed to it throughout its education system (European Commission 2002). To reach this goal, the Ministry of Education has launched a policy programme for entrepreneurship education. The programme emphasises the importance of entrepreneurship education as a part of teachers basic and extension studies. (Opetusministeriö 2004). However, the educational research of the dynamics of entrepreneurial learning has hardly begun. Mainly, this discourse has taken place in business disciplines and in some extent in the field of technology. The American view of both entrepreneurship and education influences the dialogue (Kyrö 2005). The conceptualisation of education oriented discourse is still fragmented and searching for its forms. However, a new European multi-scientific wave is rising in the contemporary research and this study follows this tradition. It focuses on the cultural background, innovative processes and the dynamics of learning in entrepreneurship (for example Fayolle, Ulijn and Kyrö 2005). When it comes to the virtual learning Finland is among those in the forefront in its development. For example in educational sector it has a special strategy programme following mainstreaming principles and in universities we have own programme for national virtual university (Opetusministeriö 2000). Recently virtual learning researches have identified an increasing need to focus more on social, interactive and networking learning practises (Sallila and Kalli 2002). Internet-based learning environments offer one tool to meet this challenge. For example Hakkarainen (2002) regards them as the most promising new technology applications for that purpose. As an example he describes the Canada-based “Future Learning Environment (FLE)-project”. Other examples of different projects that face these questions are, for instance, Finnish “The IQ Form” and “Metodix” that focuses on scientific research (Niemi and Ruohotie 2002, http://www.metodix.com). All three examples represent learning platforms that are rather widely used in respect to Finnish population. The latest statistics of Metodix reports that it has 3,900 registered users and 20,000 average visits/month.