Abstract
Entrepreneurship education can increase student’s entrepreneurial skills and intention; and entrepreneurship activities stimulate economic growth. Therefore, the number of entrepreneurship courses is increasing, but they are often offered to students from a specific field of study and/or to only one educational level, even though multidisciplinarity is important for entrepreneurship. This study has carried out an exploratory single case study on an entrepreneurial programme in a multidisciplinary environment, that is, the Contamination Lab of Turin (CLabTo). Moreover, pre- and post-surveys have also been conducted in order to perform some qualitative analyses. The results show the importance of creating teams with different competencies, cognitive and decision-making skills. Moreover, we explain how design-thinking is useful in entrepreneurship education and that a challenge-based entrepreneurship course leads to cooperation with external actors in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. It is also explained what the obstacles and opportunities of these programmes are and how to improve them. Moreover, on the basis of pre- and post-surveys, our qualitative analyses show that the students’ overall perception of their abilities to work in a multidisciplinary team, their entrepreneurial skills and entrepreneurial intentions increased slightly. In short, this work is aimed at increasing the importance of entrepreneurship education in a multidisciplinary environment and the use of practical-oriented teaching models.
Highlights
The purpose of raising attention towards entrepreneurship education is shared by all the Contamination Lab (CLab), each CLab has a certain degree of freedom about the topics they deal with, the specific goals of their programmes and their structures, which can vary according to the features of a city and region, such as the local entrepreneurial ecosystem
The results of the two questionnaires, which were sent to all the participants in the CLabTo entrepreneurship courses, have been used to summarise the results
The students were required to form their teams, and they were provided with meeting opportunities, such as breakfast and lunch, and team-building exercises
Summary
Universities currently have the aim of encouraging economic and social development, in part through entrepreneurship education (Souitaris et al 2007; Wilson et al 2007; O’Connor 2013; Rauch and Hulsink 2015; Siegel and Wright 2015; Barba-Sánchez and Atienza-Sahuquillo 2018), since it is capable of stimulating the entrepreneurial skills of students (Peterman and Kennedy2003; Wilson et al 2007; Athayde 2009; Morris et al 2013; Sánchez 2013) and their EntrepreneurialIntention (Peterman and Kennedy 2003; Souitaris et al 2007; Athayde 2009; Sánchez 2011, 2013; Martin et al 2013; Walter et al 2013; Bae et al 2014; Zhang et al 2014; Gielnik et al 2015). Universities currently have the aim of encouraging economic and social development, in part through entrepreneurship education (Souitaris et al 2007; Wilson et al 2007; O’Connor 2013; Rauch and Hulsink 2015; Siegel and Wright 2015; Barba-Sánchez and Atienza-Sahuquillo 2018), since it is capable of stimulating the entrepreneurial skills of students Even though many studies have been conducted on entrepreneurship education (see, for example, the recent literature review by Nabi et al 2017), they usually refer to a single specific field of study, such as business and management (DeTienne and Chandler 2004; Musteen et al 2018), sciences and technology (Souitaris et al 2007; Barba-Sánchez and Atienza-Sahuquillo 2018) or computer engineering (Arias et al 2018), there are a few exceptions, such as the study by Thursby et al (2009). Most of the aforementioned studies, such as the studies carried out by Arias et al (2018) and
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