One of the five main propositions in my newly finished dissertation (read it here) is a classification of four different approaches to action-based entrepreneurial education. It represents an answer to the question: “learning-by-doing-what“? Often when people talk about action-based education, they tell us what they mean by mentioning a couple of different approaches, instead of being specific about what they really mean. I’ve tried to identify some generic differences between various approaches, thereby proposing four different levels of action-based approaches. That way we can distinguish various approaches based on what is the key differentiating factor, instead of getting lost in all different aspects of action. Here are the four classes of action-based entrepreneurial education I’ve proposed in my dissertation (a nice figure is shown on p. 25 in my dissertation):

Creation approach. When we let learners try to create something as part of education. Could be a report, a play, a drawing, etc.

Value creation approach. When we let learners try to create something that is valuable to an external stakeholder as part of education. Could be a pitch, a business model canvas, a job done (through internship), a play (with audience this time), a collaborative result of some kind (with external collaborators).

Venture creation approach. When we let learners try to create an organization that delivers some kind of value to external stakeholders as part of education. Could be a mini-company, a consultancy firm, a business plan realized during the education, a venture pitch in a business plan competition.

Sustainable venture creation approach. When we let learners try to create an organization that delivers some kind of value to external stakeholders as part of education, but also with the purpose of making this a long-term company (i.e. not liquidate it after course end). Could be a real-life-mini-company or any kind of organization / venture with economic or social goals. This is the class where I put Venture Creation Programs (the topic of this blog).

From the above we can conclude that some kinds of educational activity that don’t fall into any of these classes and thus are not action-based are: lectures, guest lectures, class discussions, study visits and literature study. They typically don’t generate as much motivation, meaning and engagement as action-based approaches. But they are easy to deliver for the teacher. Lazy track, so to say.

If you want to read more, have a look at my dissertation which presents this in much greater detail. It can be downloaded here.

So. Finally after four years my licentiate thesis is finalized, titled “Developing Entrepreneurial Competencies – An Action-Based Approach and Classification in Education”. The dissertation is available for download here: Lackeus – Licentiate Thesis 2013 – Developing Entrepreneurial Competencies.

This final version contains five main propositions – an operationalization of entrepreneurial competencies, four classes of action-based entrepreneurial education, a causal linkage explaining how learners become entrepreneurial through experiencing emotional events, a new perspective on assessing entrepreneurial education and an “actionable knowledge” approach to bridging between traditional and progressive education.

It got one month delayed, because my supervisors didn’t like the previous version. Well, I can’t blame them. The previous version was probably way more difficult to understand than this one, and simplicity is not easy. My supervisors probably adhere to the principle “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” (Da Vinci), and that has certainly been challenging.

The dissertation will be defended on 5:th of December 1.15-3 p.m., at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. The address is Vera Sandbergs Allé 8, and the room is “IT-labbet” which is on 4:th floor in house 3 of former “Vasa Sjukhus”. Everyone is warmly welcomed. And please feel free to get back to me with your thoughts on the dissertation. Either here or through Twitter.

So after four years I’m approaching licentiate degree with my thesis almost finalized, “Entrepreneurial Competency Development in Education – a Tool-Based Approach”. By this time since start, many PhD students are already making ready for the doctoral degree. But at Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship we do education and outreach activities at the same time as doing research, so it takes more time. It’s called “action research”.

At the university feedback is a very scarce resource. So if any of you out there wants to have a look at my licentiate thesis document, I put it up here for you to read and give me feedback. It goes into print on 4:th of October, so feel free to get back to me before then. Basically my four years have generated five main propositions, and here they are:

(1) Adding value creation goals to curriculum can increase learners’ motivation and enhance the capacity to develop entrepreneurial competencies.

(2) Adding a venture creation program to the curricular offering of a higher education institution can increase its technology transfer efficiency and its capacity to develop entrepreneurial competencies.

(3) Effectuation has been identified as a method in curriculum design to increase both legitimacy and efficiency of process-based, iterative and socially situated learning environments.

(4) Educators aiming to develop entrepreneurial competencies should try to design a learning environment ripe of uncertainty and ambiguity where students frequently are able and encouraged to interact with the outside world in a working environment emphasizing a team-based approach.

(5) These kinds of emotional events and situations can be considered an explanatory proxy between educational design and developed entrepreneurial competencies.

If you want to read the entire LIC kappa, I’ve uploaded a draft version here. It contains 34 pages of text – theory, method, paper summaries and discussion. The three attached articles are available on request. Any feedback is very much appreciated!

Here is an 8 min presentation I will give at Academy of Management conference next week in Florida, USA. You can watch me rehearsing it at this video: Youtube Link. This presentation is part of a symposioum focusing on measuring impact of entrepreneurial education. You can read about the symposium here. If you want to download my slides you can find them here: Presentation AOM for PDF. Any feedback just send me an email or tweet (My twitter: @mlackeus)

I have just finished writing up my first article based on the study I do on the students at our master program in entrepreneurship here at Chalmers. I included three of the 13 students I follow for a period of 2-3 years, and the first 9 months of that time. And I must say that I am very pleased with the results so far. Using a software package called NVIVO, I have been able to create a “coding matrix” pinpointing links between strong emotions and development of entrepreneurial competencies. And there were a lot of links! The three strongest ones so far are:

1. Interaction with the outside world seems to lead to build-up of entrepreneurial self-efficacy (i.e. “I can do this!”). Okay, maybe obvious to some from a “common sense” perspective, but I for my part have not seen that many (or almost any) empirically based studies having pinpointed this relationship down in an empirically trustworthy way. And now that the data is collected we can start understanding more in-depth why this happens, how we can make it happen more often and in more diverse environments. Because I have numerous examples of how this happens just in the three students’ interviews I have analyzed so far (I have 10 more to go for analysis, and 1-2 more years when I will follow them). We can also start arguing for the value of interacting with the outside world with more solid arguments than the current ones “it feels right”  and “general learning theory seems to indicate this”.

2. A learning environment characterised by uncertainty and ambiguity seems to increase students’ ability to manage uncertainty and ambiguity (I.e. “I dare to do this” or “I know that things will sort themselves out somehow along the way”). Okay, even more obvious you might say. But remember that the usual response from a student experiencing uncertainty and ambiguity is “This is bad, you have to fix this professor”. And the usual response from professors is to try and go fix it, make the course / program / task more clear, structured and predictable. But we might actually need to do the opposite, if we want our students to be good at managing uncertainty and ambiguity, which is defined in literature as an entrepreneurial competency.

3. Team-based environments seem to lead to increased self-insight (i.e. “I now know that I am like this”). Also self-insight is defined in literature as an entrepreneurial competency.

In addition to the three links outlined above, I uncovered a baffling 17 more links with examples and stories explaining how it all connects, and from more than one student in each of the 17 links.

I think that it is now safe to claim that a learning environment that causes strong emotions among the students (provided that it is done in a “good” way, whatever “good” then is), also has a high effectiveness when it comes to developing entrepreneurial competencies among the students participating. This has some rather strong implications for educators, not only within entrepreneurial education but for educators in general. I outline these implications in my article.

If you want to know more, just contact me and I can send you the article. Or, come to the Nordic Academy of Management conference in Iceland on August 21:st to 23:rd, 2013, where I will present this article at the Entrepreneurship Education track. One day I might even be able to send this article in for publication at a journal of appropriate ranking, with editors also sharing my interest for this topic (probably not so many out there).

I am becoming increasingly disturbed by the objectivist natural science inspired methods applied in the domain of entrepreneurship education. Increasingly, the positive effects (or non-effects or negative effects) of entrepreneurship education on human minds are attempted to be uncovered by applying methods originating from the study of materials and biological processes. It is done in the tradition of “evidence based” anything, a movement increasingly strong in the domain of educational research. However, this stream of research is not uncontested, far from it. Just taking one example, the debate between Slavin and Olson is illustrative of this divide in educational research. In his article on evidence-based educational policies (see here), Slavin states: “Once we have dozens or hundreds of randomized or carefully matched experiments going on each year on all aspects of educational practice,  we will  begin  to make steady,  irreversible progress.”. But Olson retorts (see here), stating that “The  more simple  cause-effect  relations  so  important to  the physical and biological sciences are largely inappropriate to the human sciences, which trade on the beliefs, hopes, and reasons of intentional beings.”. Famous researcher Kurt Lewin already in 1951 lamented experimental research in social psychology (see here): “The greatest handicap of applied psychology has been the fact that, without proper theoretical help, it had to follow the costly, inefficient, and limited method of trial and error”. Indeed, a recently published meta-study on quantitative research on entrepreneurship education makes for rather depressing reading  (see here), which stands in sharp contrast to the everyday life-changing events that we witness in our own and others’ educational environments.

Based on this it seems to me that we need a different approach to studying effects of entrepreneurship education. Instead of quantitatively experimenting with thousands of students, in a trial-and-error manner, maybe we should focus on the cases of entrepreneurship education that from a real-life everyday perspective are perceived to cause strong effects on human beings, and try to study them more qualitatively, trying to uncover insights and learning from this kind of cases, hopefully resulting in tentative theories in the domain of entrepreneurial learning, that can then be tested quantitatively in randomized trials (or not). Had Jason Cope lived today he would probably have been heading in this direction, see his article toghether with Luke Pittaway from 2007 running in this very direction, here.

I propose that VCPs are such an environment just waiting to be studied more in detail by researchers around the world. This wave of research has however not yet been initiated (except for my own research as a doctoral student, and also of course my supervisor Karen Williams-Middleton’s research, and maybe there are more people out there doing this kind of research that I am not aware of yet).

Zooming in on my licentiate thesis, I have now decided on the main study object of my research (for the time being at least): mental tools in the domain of entrepreneurship, such as Venture Creation, Value Creation and Effectuation. I will describe how these mental tools can facilitate the development of entrepreneurial competencies (knowledge, skills, attitudes and values). For example, the business entity has by some been characterized as the most important innovation of humankind, and when we give students the task of creating a business of their own, the business entity concept with its multifaceted and inherently social characteristics will act as a mind tool triggering motivation, learning and transformation of people to become more entrepreneurial. At least if we don’t bury them in planning tasks, but actually let them create value in effectual ways (for more info on “effectuation”, see the work by Saras Sarasvathy).

The “mind tools” lens goes by many names, such as psychological tools, cognitive tools and cultural tools. Its origin is from groundbreaking work by Leo Vygotsky some 100 years ago, work that has been further developed by Russian colleagues such as Gal’perin, Kozulin, Stetsenko and Arievitch, and by Canadian professor Kieran Egan and his Imaginative Education Research Group (ierg.net). American professor in education David Jonassen has also focused on cognitive tools, but in a slightly different approach looking at computer mediated learning.

The difference from a learning perspective using “mind tools” is that it not only matters what knowledge, skills and attitudes are taught. It is equally important to consider what “mind tools” students are taught that at a later stage can be the tools they think with instead of about, when learning through the slightly unconscious use of these mind tools. This is opening up for learning on a quite different level. The traditional “mind tools” described by Vygotsky and others are reading and writing, i.e. language. Imagine an educational system without these tools that we perhaps seldom think about explicitly, except for in early years of schooling. I will go one step further here, considering Venture Creation, Value Creation and Effectuation (and potentially others) as such “mind tools” that the students can be triggered to think with when learning.

One example is if we consider a situation when students are asked to create value for people outside the educational context. This then becomes a way of thinking with the mind tool of “value creation”, asking the question “for whom is this valuable”, and can potentially trigger learning on a very different level than the usual classroom or lecture or project work based learning. It can eventually become a powerful way to shape entrepreneurial minds. If we want to do this kind of teaching, we then can consider methods and frameworks for value creation used outside the educational domain, and which of these methods and frameworks we can bring into the classroom.

In a couple of months my licentiate thesis will be ready, hopefully clarifying some aspects of the above text.

In the meantime, here is a conference article outlining this that hopefully some day will become published.

A couple of months ago I submitted an article outlining five major bridging capabilities of a VCP, bridging between entrepreneurship education and university technology transfer. It turned out to be a quite interesting article actually (if I may say so myself), and towards the end of writing it me and my supervisor, we realized that we had actually uncovered five rather interesting categories of bridging. Some examples below:

Experiential learning. A VCP attracts students that want to learn by doing… …business. This means that the students that want to do real stuff as part of their university studies can enter a VCP and get assigned some really hands-on tech transfer tasks. This is for the benefit of both the individual’s learning and for the university’s value creation through tech transfer. VCPs usually have developed strong partnerships with tech transfer offices (TTOs), allowing this opportunity for experiential learning. Thus, a VCP’s focus on experiential learning spurs some quite powerful bridging between entrepreneurship education and technology transfer.

Interdisciplinarity. A VCP cuts across disciplines in many ways. Students are attracted from across the university and put into interdisciplinary teams. They work with a variety of key partners within and outside the university. There are many other bridging aspects within the interdisciplinary domain. All of this means bridging between knowledge domains, bridging between various disciplines within tech transfer, and bridging between university and industry. This bridging would most likely not happen if it were not for the VCP.

Regional economic development. A VCP attracts students that might not otherwise have self-selected for an entrepreneurial career. Thus it bridges between the rather small “bubble” of people that have self-selected into the entrepreneurial ecosystem and a lot of people outside that “bubble”. These newcomers end up creating value for their region by acting entrepreneurially as part of the VCP program (and hopefully for the rest of their lives if they “catch the entrepreneurial bug”, which many report to do indeed).

I’ll stop there for now. Have to save some goodies for the journal article if it gets accepted. Right now the decision is at the journal Education+Training, one of Emerald’s journals.

Lately it’s been quiet on my blog. I have been busy doing a lot of interviews with students at our VCP here in Gothenburg. I am following 13 students in-depth during 2 years in a longitudinal study. My aim is to understand HOW and WHY our students develop entrepreneurial competencies. It is at this stage rather clear that they become more entrepreneurial as a treatment effect of the program. Instead of the usual quantitative pre/post study with control group giving doubtful data with few insights, I have opted for a qualitative approach where I really try to understand what is going on in the lives of our students as they go through our program. I have been told a whole bunch of marvellous stories where the students explain what they are going through and how they are changing as a person. I will try to refrain from telling about all the things going on just yet, in case some of our students read this blog. I don’t want to get methodological problems by introducing bias into my study. But it is very exciting!

One thing I am working with is emotion reporting through a mobile app. All students have been given an app installed on their smartphone where they report every time they experience something emotional – positive or negative. This way I get a lot of information that I can use in the interviews. I remind them of what they have been through since last time, when we meet for the interview, and we end up having a very interesting interview each time. Often people forget emotional events after a while, or have problems recalling them in an interveiw, so this app reporting increases the ability of my study to capture the nuances of the students’ experiences. I can really get into the depth of how and why the program is affecting them deeply and causing attitudinal changes towards becoming more enterprising individuals.

Without revealing too much, I can say that I’ve been able to empirically connect students’ entrepreneurial competency development to specific program design characteristics, which in the future will allow for increased understanding of how we can design entrepreneurship education interventions that really cause students to develop entrepreneurial competencies. Some aspects are common sense, others are quite counter-intuitive.

Having mapped out so many VCPs around the world, and also to some extent proved that this kind of program is so rare, I also now know that our program here in Gothenburg is one of the most interesting programs to study world-wide. That increases the value of this study on our students, since this specific empirical setting is one of the most action-based programs around. Therefore I can be relatively sure that the treatement effects are also among the strongest one could find globally (assuming that higher degrees of action and immersion in real-life settings in entrepreneurship programs also lead to stronger treatment effects, but this is in line with what most scholars say today).

The quest for increasing regional competitiveness by building various kinds of innovation support systems very seldomly takes the people populating these innovation systems enough into account. It is often implicitly assumed that an innovative region’s support system will be amply populated just because it exists. Entrepreneurial individuals are assumed to self-select into the system and take advantage of various support mechanisms. Reality is probably far from this assumed ideal world. The percentage of a population that engages in self-employment activity seldom reaches above single-digit figures, and the quest for increasing this specific figure is often conducted in implicit and ill-defined ways.

Entrepreneurship and enterprise education are often stated to act as a mediator increasing the amount of people choosing an entrepreneurial career in society. The problem is however that to date (to my knowledge) no study on impact of entrepreneurial education has been able to escape the self-selection bias issue, since most entrepreneurial education is voluntary. A recent example is the EU-financed study on “Effects and impact of entrepreneurship programmes in higher education”, conducted by  EIM  Business  &  Policy  Research in Netherlands (featuring Chalmers and 8 other higher education institutions deemed to be of high standard). The authors briefly comment on the self-selection bias issue, and state that “the latitude of the bias seems to be small considering the relatively limited differences in personal characteristics prior to higher education”. As so often, a very discomforting handling of this crucial issue.

This issue is one reason I find venture creation programs so interesting from a societal impact perspective. They cross the border between voluntary venture creation and mandatory curriculum-based activities. Not that this kind of programs are mandatory to anyone, but because many of those signing up for this kind of programs probably don’t understand what kind of transformative journey they have signed up for, thereby increasing the amount of people that get an opportunity to try out entrepreneurship without having to take the risky plunge into the usual voluntary extra-curricular support systems designed for those that have already taken the leap of faith.

I think that we need to supply more opportunities for people to discover an entrepreneurial way of doing things in life both by starting companies and by doing other kinds of action-based value creation activities in educational settings. But then we need more ample access than today to the core educational activities that a majority of our populations are required to attend to. Only then will we be able to escape the single-digit figures of population share choosing an entrepreneurial career. Today we only expose single-digit share of the population for even the slightest chance to be contaminated by the entrepreneurial bug.

This is a flaw of most innovation policy work today I fear. One light in the darkness was seen in my home country of Sweden recently, when a national innovation strategy was decided upon by the Swedish government that actually puts the individual in focus rather than all other things usually focused upon – technology, patents, capital, systems, organisations, etc etc etc (long list). This has potential to lead to concrete activities aiming at changing people’s mindsets before it is too late.

After all, show me an example when entrepreneurial value was created without involving people… Trying to positively influence people’s attitudes to entrepreneurial ways of life through the educational system might be worth increased efforts, provided that the poitical aims are justified. And since when is education free from politics? It just simply isn’t, so why pretend it is?