Abstract:

Focus on entrepreneurship education has shifted from "whether" it should be taught to "how" it should be taught. Entrepreneurship itself is a process and one that requires teaching interventions also to be, therefore, process oriented. Additionally, Rasmussen and Sorheim (2006) believe that there is a need to move away from these individual centric teaching to a more action oriented teaching because, in the former the there is an over emphasis on the assumption that entrepreneurial capabilities are inborn than learned. Honig (2004) argues that “entrepreneurship is an inductive process by which various products, services, and ideas are examined, attempted, modified and delivered (pg. 260).” And therefore calls for a more experiential approach to teaching entrepreneurship. However, experiential education can be sometimes difficult to implement due to resource constraints, institutional barriers and reluctance of the learner to engage in experiential learning. Entrepreneurship Education (EE) aims not only to produce entrepreneurs who create businesses but also individuals who solve problems by adopting an entrepreneurial mindset. It is increasingly accepted that the best way to provide such EE is through Experiential Learning (EL). To this end, game-based learning (GBL), when integrated with traditional learning can encourage EL and problem solving. Well-designed GBL can simulate the entrepreneurship process within the safety of a classroom, thereby allowing students to experience not only success but also failure without the real-world costs.

GBL approaches can also be more useful as they can get the students to experience something that cannot be learnt except through experience and practice. An example here is Entrepreneurial Uncertainty. While EE can teach well about Risk and Change, Uncertainty remains largely untouched albeit being a large and one of the most challenging part of any entrepreneurial process.

To address this, we deployed a board-game “ESHIP: Navigating Uncertainty”. The game takes students through an entrepreneurial process with subtly embedded Design Thinking principles. However, the game also presents them with Uncertainty right from the game-start where the rules are not provided right at the onset, and is interspersed with uncertain situations that show up in guises such as team-formation or dynamics, entrepreneurial process itself, and random events.

So, in brief we attempted to simulate the a major chunk of the entrepreneurial process into a short simulation in a classroom setting to see if and how it would capture the students imaginations. We found increased engagement and reduction in bias towards entrepreneurship as well as identification of a possible self as an entrepreneur – i.e. development of an entrepreneurial identity which the game triggers through a role-play mechanism. However, we were only able to simulate the process from team dynamics to opportunity recognition and exploitation but not all the way to the creation of a robust business model as it was felt that this would be too much to pack into one game session. Nevertheless, the learnings gained from here indicated that board game simulations are still as relevant as digital simulations and in the case of entrepreneurship education maybe they even edge out digital tools because of the necessary human element that face-to-face interaction and deal-making and consensus-building demands in Entrepreneurship in general.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship Education, gamification, uncertainty, pedagogical innovation, board games, design thinking.