Abstract:

The European Commission considers SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and entrepreneurship as keys to ensure economic growth, innovation, job creation, and social integration in the EU. The majority of today’s start-ups founded utilize digitalization as a core of their business model. To foster entrepreneurship, there are many starting points to consider. Academic programmes are an important strategy to prepare future leaders bringing forward entrepreneurial activities in three different ways – dealing with start-ups (partnerships, source of innovation), being intrapreneurs in corporate organizations, or starting their own business.

Research has shown that within a digital so called „VUCA” environment (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), transformational and systemic leadership styles are promising conditions for success. Therefore, future leaders need five core competencies – cognitive, interpersonal, business, and strategic skills as well as citizenship behaviour.

However, findings of the European Commission show that women constitute 52% of the total European population, but female entrepreneurs represent only 30% of all start-up entrepreneurs. The question is why entrepreneurship seems to be a less attractive option for women than for men and how to overcome this. The European Commission is working with EU countries to overcome this and encourage more women to start their own entrepreneurial endeavours. As part of this strategy, the Erasmus+ funded project "EqualDigiTalent" works on defining the Master programme "Gender Equality in Digital Entrepreneurship" with different partner institutions in Liechtenstein, Austria, and Germany.

Our paper shows how the learning module "Digital Business Management and Leadership" has been developed, tested, and evaluated between November 2017 and March 2018 at the Berlin Professional School. Based on the above-mentioned core competencies and current entrepreneurial gender imbalances, we combined modern teaching methods with a distinct gender approach. We laid the theoretical foundation in three classroom sessions before leaving the building for a week-long field trip („Digital Safari“) to the digital and start-up-scene of Berlin, packed with varying locations, diverse organizations, different guest speakers with a balance of female and male role models, practical experience such a design thinking workshops, individual interviews within the digital scene, gender and national heterogeneity within the teams, reflection loops on gender and unconscious biases, gendered teaching material, and so on. In conclusion, our paper shows our four-step learning evaluation process and derives improvement opportunities and learnings.

The distinct learning impact and the positive feedback from students prove the importance of a multi-method teaching approach to foster leadership and gender balance for the digital transformation. Our paper will be of specific use to academic teachers that are looking for new impulses and evidence for the development of new modules within the field of entrepreneurship, digitalization, leadership, and gender.

Keywords:

Digital Transformation and Leadership, Entrepreneurship Education, Post-graduate Education, Creativity and Design Thinking, Assessment of Student Learning.