Having been invited to join the IEEC conference by video link, I take the opportunity to share with you the folder we produced in connection with the Entrepreneurial Learning Forum in June 2012 in Gothenburg. We had the pleasure of reveiving guests from VCPs all around the world at this conference, and the discussions were truly inspirating! Here is the folder:

Venture Creation Programs – 14 case descriptions in USA and Europe

Thank you Kieran Egan for putting me on the right track to the next step in my PhD thesis process. It took three years to find this turn in my personal roller-coaster. Egan eloquently argues here that trying to understand human learning only from a “human nature” psychological perspective is bound to fail. We need to consider the tools that bring the human mind to life, what he calls “cognitive tools”, or “cultural-cognitive tools”. So what are the tools I study? Well, two major cognitive tools boosting learning that are frequently used in entrepreneurship education are 1) the (giving) birth of/to a legal entity, and 2) the notion of creating (new kinds of) value for other people. Combined, this for example gives us the “start-up scene” or any variation of it. The minute you invite students to this cultural-cognitive life-world, and invite them to act in it as if it were theirs, it often resonates within them and every related disciplinary subject has a potential to spring to life, and give learning a completely new dimension. I have witnessed it myself, and my fellow alumni tell me the same story consistently.

1) The giving birth to a legal entity (potentially of a revolutionary kind) resonates with our desire to obtain (social) immortality by creating something that transcends ourselves, in an existentialism based way described by Sartre and others.

2) The desire to create value to other people also resonates with basic human desires, i.e. to be useful, quite well described by Emerson:

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Now, if we combine these two immensely powerful “cultural-cognitive tools” (1 and 2) and insert them into an educational context (and really make them work, which takes a lot of fine-tuning), it gives the life-changing and transformative learning experience that we can observe at the very few venture creation programs that exist around the world. But if we want to find the general implications for learning and education from these rare programs, we cannot escape, omit or disregard the powerful cultural-cognitive tools that surround this kind of programs, they are as important to consider as the human mind and brain driving the learning process. This is an immensely important point made by Kieran Egan. For which I thank him!

It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that the theory on transformative learning pioneered by Jack Mezirow and followed by a giant heap of other researchers (a dozen books, hundreds of papers and around 150 dissertations have been produced, according to Kitchenham here) is a very interesting path to explore more in-depth when trying to understand what goes on in  entrepreneurship education, and especially venture creation programs and other intensive entrepreneurial educational experiences. The links between transformative learning and entrepreneurship education seem to be very scarce. In an upcoming conference on transformative learning in San Fransisco (link), there is only one out of more than 100 speakers that seems to cross-over between these two domains, and that is a Greek researcher named Alexandros Kakouris. I have come across his name before, as he is also into game based learning (see here), yet another domain that has interesting insights potentially on offer for entrepreneurship educators.

One of the (or The) most cited books by Jack Mezirow is “Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning”, with 3833 citations according to Google Scholar, see here. This book contains a lot of links to emotions, another hot topic for my inquiries (read about my literature review on this topic here). One idea that emerged from reading parts of this book is that the old saying that “Repetion is the key to learning”, might be adjusted to “Repetion and emotion are the keys to learning”. This is a nice quote from Mezirow pointing in this direction (p.36):

“The stronger the affective (emotional) dimension of an interpretation and the more frequently it is made, the easier it is to remember.”.

This means that we should strive not only to make our students repeat things we want them to learn, but also try obtaining high levels of emotionality (both positive and negative) in our courses and programs, in order to increase their retention rate of what we try to teach them, and thus increase the chances of reaching desired learning outcomes of an eduational intervention.

Are there more interesting links between entrepreneurship education and transformative learning out there?

Last thing before vacation started I finalized an article to the ISBE research conference coming up in Dublin in November. The article describes the results of my 1,5 year quite extensive literature searches on the topic of emotions in entrepreneurship education (and the related topic of emotions in education in general). When searching for articles treating entrepreneurship AND emotions AND education AND learning, only 22 articles showed up! A field in its infancy thus! (mind the gap…)

I conclude in the article that there seems to be an emotional revolution going on in psychology that has not yet reached the domain of entrepreneurship education. The field of entrepreneurship education is also largely disconnected from the emotional aspects discussed in the fields of psychology, education, neuroscience and creativity. The only relevant scholar outside of entrepreneurship education quoted widely is David Kolb, and his most famous book was published almost 30 years ago! The world has moved on, and there is more developed thinking out there that does not seem to be used almost at all. My own favourite is Peter Jarvis, whose quite (but not very) recent “comprehensive theory on human learning” puts equal emphasis on thoughts, actions and emotions (which is very VERY unusual), and offers a wide range of interesting angles to human learning which are very relevant to entrepreneurship education. I also conclude that many slightly lazy (or uninterested) scholars quote Kolb or Gibb, and that’s it, they don’t dig any deeper. Gibb is one of my own favourites, but the world did not become complete with his work. There are more things to uncover out there, such as the comprehensive work by Dewey which is not very frequently cited. We need to dig deeper and much more outside our own domain if we are to advance the field, I think. Some leading scholars outside the entrepreneurship domain that showed up in my review were Andy Hargreaves, Arlie Hochschild, Jennifer Nias, Reihard Pekrun and Michalinos Zembylas. These I will study even more soon, it seems I have just scratched the surface.

What is your take on the theme of emotions in entrepreneurship education?

We have now lived through our first Entrepreneurial Learning Forum, which has mainly focused on Venture Creation Programs, and we are positively overwelmed and overjoyed. The past two days have given us at Chalmers and I hope our emerging VCP community a sense of family, legitimacy and importance above and beyond what we have experienced in isolation up to now. We will be in the near and more distant future be complementing this and other forums (ex. on Linked in or Facebook) with content and contributions, but for now, we would just like to say THANK YOU to all the ELF participants and welcome to the family! ‘Woof woof” and ‘cling cling’!! Karen (speaking, unanchored for Mats, Martin, Viktor and the rest)

Wow, what a fantastic group of people that came from all over the world to Gothenburg to discuss venture creation programs at our forum focusing on the entrepreneurial learning that occurs at these unique programs! As someone said, “I have never before been in an international conference where we so quickly came down to discussing core issues, without getting stuck at definitional discussions”. It was evident that the people managing and championing these programs had very much in common, despite being quite a heterogenous group in many ways – region-wise, size of institutions, backgrounds, theory vs practice orientation etc etc. Someone asked if we just had invited our friends, because of the family-like atmosphere that quickly developed, but actually quite few of the participants had met before at all. Or as one of the American program managers said to one of the others from US: “How come we haven’t heard of you before?!”.

One of the results of this milestone conference is that we now are determined to keep this global community going by creating a network entity facilitating further collaboration and exchange. We at Chalmers will try to lead this development, but it is now evident that it will be a truly collective endeavour since everybody has so much to gain from collaborating in this unique group of people / programs. We will all try to meet again in one year, either at one of the participating institutions or in connection with EURAM in Istanbul in June 2013, where Chalmers will be hosting a track on Entrepreneurial Behaviour.

Here is a list of participating institutions:

A couple of weeks ago I was in Mikkeli, Finland, to talk about how to build entrepreneurial ecosystems through action-based education. It was the yearly conference for the SPACE-EU network, a quite large network of educators in international business and language. They have recently begun to explore the area of entrepreneurial education, and have a working group that is investigating this on behalf of their members, read more here. At first, I thought that they must have mistakenly asked a PhD student to be a keynote speaker. But when I got there, it was obvious that they knew very well what we are doing at Chalmers and they were very interested in hearing more about it. So I talked about the entrepreneurial gap between academic life and the outside world, about venture creation programs as an entity that can bridge the gap, and about opportunities to generalize beyond venture creation programs within the area of entrepreneurial learning and teaching. It was very well received indeed, to my slight surprise! Actually this network has as one of its mission statements to “facilitating the bridging of the gap between higher education institutions and the business community and key stakeholders. “. So after having read that, I am not so surprised anymore. Very nice to meet new friends in this endeavour!

We are now in the final stage of planning the inaugural Entrepreneurial Learning Forum, and we are very excited indeed! 75% of the programs we have invited are actually coming to Gothenburg in Sweden to meet us and the Swedish summer. We have sent out a survey to the around 30 confirmed participants in order to find out more about what they are interested in discussing. All but one have responded, and we now know what this very unique group of people are both more and less interested in. I can now reveal the three most common topics of interest to the participants. Within entrepreneurial context the most interesting subject is Dual Missions, or “How can both educational and venture creation ambitions be achieved simultaneously?”. Within entrepreneurial teaching the most interesting subject is Action vs Knowledge, or “How is the action-based part of the education integrated into knowledge development?”. Withing entrepreneurial learning the most interesting subject is Initiative, or “How do you get your students to take own initiatives to interact with people outside your program?”. We will discuss these and many other issues on 12-13:th of June at the inaugural forum. We expect it to be the starting point of a very active and dynamic global community of action-based educators.

This week I have investigated a potential venture creation program in Singapore, and it indeed seems that they let the students start real ventures as formal part of the program. They even use business ideas from other universities, notably University of Washington in Seattle, USA. This is the first instance of a venture creation program I have seen having a structure for using intellectual property from another university and part of the world in their program. But probably not the last! It remains to be seen how exactly this is done, and I have tried to contact the people responsible. The problem in my investigations with Asia is that the language barrier is higher, but I will get the opportunity to try Google Translate to its limits. And I am also searching in the very good book about entrepreneurship education in Asia recently released by Edward Elgar. We have also invited Nanyang Technological University to our Entrepreneurial Learning Forum in June 2012 where we are inviting all confirmed VCPs we can find.

I am now starting my Big Dig into emotion based (entrepreneurial) learning and teaching. Psychologists often say that human mind consists of three main aspects – thoughts, actions and feelings. Experiential educators often emphasize the actions – “Learning by doing”, as opposed to “Learning by thinking” or reading or attending theoretical lectures. The entire area of Entrepreneurial Learning has been studying extensively how entrepreneurs learn on-the-job by doing / acting. According to Cope, Rae and others however, it seems that critical ‘events’ or ‘episodes’ give a deeper level of learning than most other experiences. Entrepreneurs learn by experiencing a crisis or other kind of major event where emotional arousal is very high. But then it might be more relevant to talk about “Learning by feeling”, because it is when we experience emotions that we really change our perceptions and learn for life. Jarvis states that it is necessary to experience a ‘disjuncture’ in order to learn, as opposed to situations of harmony which are basically non-learning situations. Harmony seekers are people reluctant to throwing themselves into situations where they might experience emotions, disjuncture and consequently learn something new. Entrepreneurs could be viewed as quite the opposite. Disjuncture and emotionality is their daily meal. So by digging into emotion based entrepreneurial teaching and learning I hope to find some new exciting insights. Will report back later here…