How to deliver quality entrepreneurial education at scale

  

Introduction

Entrepreneurial education (EE) for university students has never been more important and we hope that our last article on the subject left you convinced of this.

Here, we unpack some of the major challenges that universities face in delivering quality entrepreneurial education at scale; and then follow with two solutions that might help you address these issues.

To make this for easy reading, each of the sections has an infographic summarising the theme, followed by some text elaborating on that diagram. For copies of the three infographics, click here: Entrepreneurial Education Infographics and we will send them to you.

The three sections are:

• The major challenges facing universities in delivering entrepreneurial education 
  
• A top-down approach to getting started 
  
• An “agile” approach to getting started (borrowing lessons from entrepreneurship itself). 
  

 The work is based on our (Mashauri) experience in developing and implementing entrepreneurial courses, the personal experience of myself (Simon Gifford) and my co-founder (Apoorv Bamba), our research into the topic and most importantly supported by our colleague Professor David Gibson who has earned an OBE for his work in entrepreneurial education.

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1. The major challenges facing universities

The infographic takes the form of a flow diagram that shows how the primary challenge of not delivering consistent entrepreneurial education is through lack of support from the top of the organisation (DVC / VC) - and indicated the main reasons why that might be the case. The second branch assumes there is top level support and then highlights the reasons why this may not translate into the desired outcome.




The four reasons why the commitment may not result in the desired outcome of quality entrepreneurial education at scale has been broken down into 4 categories; with the typical examples of why this might occur in the adjacent blocks:

• Commitment not translated into implementation processes 
  
• Lack of capacity to deliver 
  
• Unclear how to deliver 
  
• Poor quality delivery of education. 
  

In most cases, the reasons are a combination of the above, but we believe this is a useful framework to consider the challenges.

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2. A top-down approach to addressing the challenges

A classic strategy, especially if the senior level commitment is missing, is to take a top-down transformation approach: develop a shared vision and cascade the actions down the organisation.


Note the double-headed arrow between vision and commitment indicating that this is an iterative process as the vision is co-created and shared with the key stakeholders. This initiatives will be strongly driven by senior management. The vision is clear and appropriate control and progress measurements put in place.
  

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3. An agile approach to solving the problems

Senior level commitment remains a sine qua non for an institution to deliver quality entrepreneurial education at scale; but in this model the implementation of that commitment becomes more light touch. Different parts of the university are encouraged to “get on with it” in their own way (give them a compass and a destination, not a roadmap) with support from a small transformation unit with permission to make things happen. The approach is iterative in nature and allows for some quick wins and a developmental approach to becoming an institution with strong EE capability.



This may go a little against the grain for established institutions, but organisations around the world are beginning to recognise this type of flexible, bottom-up process is a more effective way of getting to results. This approach takes into account the differences between different departments and professors and for entrepreneurial education to be effective it needs to be adapted to the situation. There will be certain groups and individuals who have a greater passion and capacity for this work and it makes sense to use them as early innovators. In this agile approach, the entrepreneurial education model within the institution is clarified as it develops - in true entrepreneurial fashion.

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4. Conclusion

Every institution is different in terms of their status, context and vision. Therefore those who truly wish to graduate students with an entrepreneurial mindset will need to develop their own approach. We hope that the above concepts will offer some valuable input to your thinking. Any one of us (myself, Apoorv or David) would be happy to enter a dialogue with you if you believe we might help you through this process. If you would like to download copies of the 3 infographics, please click here and we will send them to you. Entrepreneurial Education Infographics

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Mashauri is an entrepreneurial education platform that supports institutions in developing an entrepreneurial mindset in their students.

Developing tomorrow’s entrepreneurs today!

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Should an entrepreneurial education be offered to all university students?

From the student perspective, the answer is certainly “yes”; and from the perspective of the institution the answer is probably a “yes” as well.

I need to start with a disclaimer: the last 6 years of my life have been focussed on developing Mashauri: an education platform for universities to enable them to offer their students an entrepreneurial education - so I may have a slight bias here. On the other hand, the research we have conducted and the experience gained, have done nothing to dissuade me from this - although we have received some negatives from certain quarters (see later).

This article lays out the benefits of entrepreneurial education from the perspective of the student, the university and the community and economy. We end with a hint of the challenges of providing such education - as a run-in to a subsequent article due to be published soon. However, before discussing the benefits, we begin by explaining what we mean by entrepreneurial education. We have not set out to make this a long, academic paper but rather have tried to put our views across succinctly with some useful questions for deliberation at the end of each section. We trust this will not offend our readers (the majority of you are academics), and hope that you value the utility and brevity of the contents.

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What is entrepreneurial education.

In our view (and the view of many, including the UK enterprise and entrepreneurship guidance), entrepreneurial education teaches a scientific approach to conceiving, launching and growing a new business through experiential learning. In most cases, that means by the student actually undertaking some or all of these phases and learning-by-doing. The advantages of such are not only that the student internalises a reusable approach but furthermore starts to gain some of the cognitive skills that make up an entrepreneurial mindset including:

• Creativity and innovation
• Opportunity recognition, creation and evaluation
• Decision making supported by critical analysis, synthesis and judgement
• Implementation of ideas through leadership and management
• Action and reflection
• Communication and strategy skills
• Digital and data skills

Fundamentally, we encourage a “learning through entrepreneurship” approach (as opposed to “learning about entrepreneurship”).

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Benefits for students

“There are a number of reasons I am going to uni, but the key one is to lay a strong foundation for my career.”
Dani G.: University of Leeds.

Entrepreneurial education has four main benefits for a student.

1. It opens up the possibility of becoming an entrepreneur as a viable career choice.
   Surprisingly, in many universities the majority of students do not get the appropriate exposure that even allows them to consider this; and certainly not sufficient information to help them evaluate their propensity to undertake such a career.
2. The competencies, attitude and experience increase the immediate employability of that student.
   Corporates and other graduate employers are looking beyond the academic results to select employees who might eventually become leaders of their organisations. A quote from the WEF report on “What skills do employers most value from graduates” highlights this point:
   “The kinds of skills cultivated through social entrepreneurship are linked to the soft skills that graduate employers have repeatedly told us they prize, but which they believe graduates lack. Chief among these are creativity, resourcefulness, team-working, innovation, resilience, IT skills, and innovation.”
3. There has been a rise in social and environmental consciousness among students in the last decade. Entrepreneurship, especially social entrepreneurship is a potential path to allowing these students to work in these areas where they feel they are able to make a more direct impact on these areas of concern.
4. The skills developed in obtaining an entrepreneurial mindset track closely many of the skills required in the “21st century graduate” which are essential to becoming a useful global citizen who is able to guide their own destiny through an uncertain future.

DVC Key questions

• How well are you meeting students’ needs for employability post graduation?
• Are students in all faculties being exposed to entrepreneurship or is it focussed in the business and commerce areas?
• How far have you moved to developing real life skills for students?

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Benefits for the institution

“At National University of Singapore, we offer entrepreneurial-minded individuals the platform to pursue their dreams and achieve success. Our goal is to nurture current and future entrepreneurial leaders for business success, while igniting the spirit of innovation and enterprise in our students, staff and alumni.”
Source:  NUS Enterprise

We recognise 4 benefits of offering entrepreneurial education to the university

1. It helps in the overall positioning of the university when communicating to potential students, parents and the world.
   Although entrepreneurship is only recently beginning to appear on the university ranking tables, more and more applicants are beginning to consider this as a factor in their choice of institution.
2. It facilitates links with corporates and public sector organisations.
   Private sector are looking more and more to universities as a source of innovation as well as employees; and in return universities are seeking support in terms of funding and sponsorships. Entrepreneurial education can be a natural bridge between the two.
3. It encourages commercialisation of research - and as such potential future income streams.
   Technology Transfer Offices and Centres of Entrepreneurship / Innovation have the capacity to become strong sources of income for universities.
4. It may make the university itself more entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial in its thinking and approach.
   The European Commission’s HEInnovate initiative discusses the importance of this as well as offering an assessment tool to measure how entrepreneurial is your institution (something which Mashauri could work with you in applying).
   
   An interesting challenge and opportunity is that academic staff themselves seldom undertake entrepreneurial activities. This hampers their ability to teach entrepreneurship in an experiential fashion. The opportunity of creating “entrepreneurial academics” beyond teaching ability is in the way they look at the world and the potential impact on developing an entrepreneurial university.

DVC questions

• How consistent is your entrepreneurial education across the institution?
• How clear is entrepreneurship in your overall positioning?
• How closely tied is your TTO to all the entrepreneurial initiatives happening?
• How organised is your outreach programme to corporates and do you have a clear value proposition for them?
• How entrepreneurial is your university?
• As a DVC, how much are you thinking about the opportunities and threats arising from edtech-driven disruptive technologies?

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Benefits for the community and economy

“Governments across the world are looking to technology innovation as a driver for national economic growth, and to universities as the incubators of this national capacity. Universities operating within established technology-driven innovation hubs, such as Silicon Valley and Kendall Square in the US, offer robust models for success within these environments. However, an increasing number of universities located within more challenging environments are establishing strong entrepreneurship and innovation (E&I) profiles and reputations, some of whom will undoubtedly become future national and international leaders.”
Source: Creating university-based entrepreneurial ecosystems evidence from emerging world leaders. MIT-Skoltech initiative

The benefits for the community and economy are mostly self-evident.The key ones we come across in our work are:

1. Students working on solving real problems in the community making an immediate impact and producing good relations with neighbours. Furthermore, communities and countries have problems that are unique and may not attract the attention of the global players to solve them.
2. Job creation is driven by entrepreneurship (although there is significant debate around the quantum of this) and particularly in developing economies with high unemployment rates, it is often the only alternative for many individuals.
3. Entrepreneurship and innovation go hand in hand and those countries with the highest innovation levels are likely to increase their share of the global economy. Israel is a case in point (WEF: Israel is a tech titan).

DVC questions:

• Are you playing a role in national innovation?
• Are you recognised as a source of innovative individuals who could play upon the world stage?
• Do you know how well your alumni are doing against the above factor?

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Conclusion

We believe there is ample evidence as to why universities should be extending their entrepreneurial education activities more broadly across their institutions. As is always the case, there are examples of excellence here (for instance MIT in the US and iE Business School in Spain); but many other institutions are lagging here. This is generally not through lack of will, but there are a range of challenges that make it difficult.

We will soon be writing another article in this series discussing the challenges (and how they may be addressed). If you would like an early flavour of this, receive a summary of the top 5 challenges faced by universities when trying to implement entrepreneurial education at scale by clicking here: Top 5 Challenges.

Please have a look around our site to see the types of services and solutions we have in terms of supporting universities in offering experiential-based entrepreneurial education to their students. Furthermore, if you would like a one-on-one conversation to talk about your challenges and opportunities, please drop me a line (simon.gifford@mashauri.org) and we can hold a video conference. There is no charge for this type of conversation as we are likely to obtain as much value as you will from the dialogue.

Mashauri ... developing tomorrow's entrepreneurs today!

An excellent, inspiring and thought provoking discussion around education of innovative societies. It gives glimpses into the future of education.  Recorded on 19th September 2018.

The discussion moves across a range of topics (see below), unsurprisingly given the diversity of the panel and audience. Most of the readers of this article will be embroiled in doing the best they can with limited resources, current students and meeting day to day objectives. That is why it is useful to sit back a little and consider a more future-looking and visionary perspective of education - and that is what this video will help you do. It is an hour in length, but is probably worth grabbing a cup of coffee and running through the whole video.

If you do not have the time to view this (or want to find out if the contents justify the effort), some of the points of interest for me were:

• the divergence of education and learning
• inside out learning (referring to learning on devices not in classroom)
• credentialism and the blockchain
• the importance of entrepreneurial education
• the importance of self-belief and self-efficacy in learning
• making graduates job-ready and future-ready
• using adaptive technologies to facilitate scaffolding
• problems with focus on traditional grading
• linking innovation, creativity and the arts

Click on the image above to view the video or go to WEF link to view:  Educating innovative societies  

Contact me at simon.gifford@mashauri.org to discuss implications for you, your institution and your students.

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The future of education

HolonIQ have just released their latest report on education in 2030. 

The big picture: among thousands of responses gathered from over 50 countries, only 5% of respondents chose “Education-as-Usual” as their preferred scenario. However, on average the global cohort estimated it was still 45% likely that “Education-as-Usual” is how 2030 will look when we get there. 

Read the highly visual report to obtain an interesting view on how education may unfold in the futue, where 5 different scenarios are considered.

The question is why do so many people believe that education will not change as much as most seem to want it to? Where is the inertia built into the system and what will it take to overcome that and start producing the type of education fit for purpose in the next decade and beyond? 

Leave a comment with your thoughts below?

At the Times Higher Education World Summit,  heads of leading European and Asian universities have suggested that Universities must create an educational environment where “constructive failure” can flourish if they are to foster a culture of innovation,

Lino Guzzella, president of Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, said that failure is more important than success “because in success you usually learn very little but in failure you learn a lot”.

Speaking at the Times Higher Education World Academic Summit in Singapore, Professor Guzzella said that ETH Zurich has “a rich tradition of project-based learning” but has recently combined this with an approach of “constructive failure”.

“We try to formalise this process by bringing students in a friendly environment, in a safe environment, to the breaking point where they fail. And we provide an environment where they can learn from their failure and really grow,” he said, adding that this approach allows students to develop both technical and personal skills.

For example, ETH Zurich brings students across all disciplines together for a week ahead of each semester to work on team projects.  

“In a week-long setting, in groups of 20, they develop crazy ideas. Not all of these ideas are viable or very useful, but that’s not the point. The point is that they learn how to interact in a diverse environment, they learn how to solve problems where there is no concrete solution,” he said, during a panel discussion on the role of research universities in creating societal impact.

“If you teach your students how to solve research problems which have no answer, you teach them how to solve the common problems of the world.”

Professor Guzzella added that it was important that such programmes start at undergraduate level.

Eng Chye Tan, president of the National University of Singapore, said that his institution was also trying to embed “constructive failure” into its educational programmes.

“We hear too much about success but it is true that students learn the most from failure. And if you can [foster this] through an experience, all the better,” he said during the same session.

Professor Tan said that NUS creates this environment by sending hundreds of students abroad each year to locations including Silicon Valley and Shanghai, where they work at start-ups during the day and study at partner universities in the evening.

He said that one student recently went to Israel through this programme and worked at a company that “collapsed” during his internship.

“If you were working after graduation in such a company you would have lost a job. But being a student on an attachment, actually you experience the tribulations of success and failure and that’s extremely valuable,” he said.

Another way of of allowing constructive failure is through the use of simulations (refer Mashauri simulations ), whereby students are given challenges and need to take decisions - and then get immediate feedback. Normally they are then able to repeat the exercise and see the impact of different decisions.

Contact me at simon.gifford@mashauri.org if you would like to find out more about these simulations.

This question came up a few times in this weeks' office hours: how do we get a list of users to try your product and give you feedback?

Jesse Leimgruber from NeoReach put together the following ranked list of ~300 places you can submit your product at launch:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1leGn6nlu96pIJ68dw3lzeKRRiIiC7jG2MCgEhMRiSZI/edit#gid=0

These are services where you can list or launch your startup to a broad, preexisting community in an attempt to encounter new user types. Experimentally, systematically launching to everyone on this list of communities will yield a few hundred to several thousand signups.

It's important to note that these are typically unqualified sources of traffic – early adopter communities and similar – so when analyzing the outcomes here, you should be looking for patterns in feedback from users to find reproducible user personas, versus treating this as a scalable way to get growth.

The "A" ranked places on Jesse's list are worth starting with, and summarized below along with his comments. (I wouldn't bother with anything past "B"– you should be more focused than that.)

1. Reddit Programming. "Very strong community. Great leads if your product is for devs."
2. Reddit-Entrepreneur Appreciates good storytelling.
3. Social Influencers – Jesse can intro.
4. PR Log – "Free press release distribution service"
5. F6S "Platform to features startup deals"
6. Mashable Press – go in through an intro.
7. Techcrunch Press – go in through an intro.
8. Android Authority "I know him. Have worked with him."
9. Startup List "Some people say it's hit or miss. I love it."
10. Fiverr Tactics "Lots of spam, sift through the noise"
11. Slack List and Chitchats.co "Join (and ask for feedback) in a private Slack Group"
12. Hackernews "Most active community of hackers and entrepreneurs."
13. Top Bloggers "Network of bloggers."
14. Shoutcart "Network of influencers $20-$200/each"
15. Beta List "Really really good. 25k+ Audience"
16. ProductHunt "The undisputed leader in my opinion. Thousands of visitors."

We at Mashauri greatly admire Y Combinator (the San Francisco based accelerator - and in fact the first ever accelerator). They began a Startup School a few years ago and I would like to share this video from Sam recorded in 2017 where he talks about how you can succeed as a startup. We are adding it in here for our Ashoka students - but is valuable for anyone in this field be it entrepreneur or educator.

 

 

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The lessons in summary:

• A product so good people tell friends
• Easy to understand
• Exponential growth of the underlying market
• Evangelical founder
• Ambitious vision
• The harder the better
• Confident and definite view of the future
• Huge if it works
• Team
  • Optimists
  • Idea generators
  • We'll figure it out
  • I've got it
  • Action bias
  • The blessing of inexperience
• Momentum
• Competitive advantage
• Sensible business model
• Distribution strategy
• Frugality, focus, obsession and love
• Why startups win
  • One no versus one yes
  • Fast changing market
  • Platform shifts