Abstract:

This paper seeks to identify aspects of the mentoring environment that contribute towards postgraduate students’ and tutors’ entrepreneurial development. Within the Innovation and Enterprise (IAE) MSc at the University of Warwick we seek to develop entrepreneurial learning and knowledge that are suggested by scholars to underpin the successful entrepreneur. This paper responds to calls to deepen our understanding of the value of mentoring within the entrepreneurial education landscape by examining the process and impact of mentoring. We examine socially constructed learning, mediated within and between teams who are bound together by shared interests, goals and interdependence. The teams form cohorts, a testbed for their tutor’s entrepreneurial methodologies. Following existing research drawing on a range of educational theoretical perspectives we examine how the community’s mentoring impacts on students. Tutors provide mentoring opportunities to students within taught sessions and more informally online. Students present work in progress for peer feedback and reflection and have an opportunity to supply drafts of media or text demonstrating work in progress for critique to students or tutors.

Keywords:

entoring, peer-to-peer mentoring, entrepreneurial education.