Utilisation of entrepreneurial experiences in student-driven mentoring processes

Abstract

Following the educational perspective of community of practice, students learn from engaging with people sharing the same interests as themselves. Previous research has shown that students in entrepreneurship education learn from other community members' experiences and have addressed learning outcome from peer mentoring. This study explores how students acting as peer mentors utilise their own entrepreneurship experiences from doing entrepreneurship in peer mentoring of nascent student entrepreneurs. The mentoring is provided by a venture incubator functioning as a community of practice. Five peer mentors in the extracurricular student venture incubator are observed during peer mentoring of a total of nine student entrepreneurship groups and then interviewed about their mentoring practices. Our findings show that the peer mentors’ experiences from entrepreneurship studies are utilised in the preliminary stages of mentoring processes, while experiences related to the venture creation processes are utilised later. This implies that when peer mentors relate theoretical knowledge to business experiences from venture creation processes, they help to make both theoretical knowledge and the venture creation process itself more understandable for student entrepreneurs. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship education literature by illustrating how entrepreneurship experiences are utilised in peer mentoring provided through a community of practice.