Abstract:

Henry & Lewis (2018) in their review of entrepreneurship education research, state that entrepreneurship is now seen as a widely accepted component of most business and management schools and is a recent addition to many non-business disciplines.

The UK’s Quality Assurance Agency (2018: 11) highlights a key role of entrepreneurship educators being to “motivate and inspire students to develop enterprising and entrepreneurial behaviours, attributes, and competencies”. They state that these competencies should be developed in ways that focus on experiential learning with the use of high engagement and high impact activities. Neck et al. (2014: 13) state that entrepreneurship education should focus on “the acquisition of skills, knowledge and mind-set through deliberate hands-on, action-based activities that enhance development of entrepreneurial competencies and performance”.

In a review of 33 studies of experiential learning in entrepreneurship education, Motta and Galina (2023) found that previous studies had identified a range of benefits from experiential approaches (development of knowledge and skills; demystifying the entrepreneurial process and increased confidence and motivation to become entrepreneurs) as well as a number of challenges for educators (lack of familiarity with experiential learning approaches; breaking away from traditional classroom culture and the limitations set by their institution’s policies and processes). In their review, they identified a need for further research into these challenges for educators as well as more focus on the links between the goals of educators and their approaches compared to the outcomes achieved. Romsgaard (2018) highlighted another overlooked aspect in this area of study being educators’ own abilities to differentiate and experiment with new approaches to entrepreneurship education.

This paper aims to build on the above-mentioned work and take a reflective approach to the authors own experiences of entrepreneurship education across 11 years and within 3 different Higher Education Institutions. The author has developed and delivered a wide range of courses, experimenting with different approaches and increasingly seeking out opportunities for students to experience aspects of entrepreneurship, these include business planning, aspects of the Lean Start-Up methodology (such as business model generation, prototyping and testing), entrepreneurship computer simulations, new venture consultancy projects and design thinking methodologies.

Data has been collected from students from a wide range of these courses, looking into their perceptions of the methods used and the extent to which they perceive specific entrepreneurial competencies to have been developed.

Through reflections on teaching practices as well as the data gathered from students, the paper will explore the following:
- Evaluation of the extent to which students can really “experience” aspects of entrepreneurship through different teaching approaches.
- Evaluation of the extent to which learning outcomes and aims of different approaches to entrepreneurship education were achieved.
- Educator and student perceptions of the different entrepreneurship education approaches (challenges, limitations, and benefits).

The overall aim is to present an evaluation of the different approaches and enable to the audience to reflect on their own practices.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship education, enterprise education, experiential learning, active learning.