Summarizing all the feedback I received on my almost final dissertation (a summary can be found here), what made the strongest impression on me was the interpretation aired by some (more than one) that my work actually can be viewed as an insult on the entire scholarly field of education research. And it’s not the first time I get this reaction, see an earlier blog post here, so it is a pattern worth analyzing further.

So of what consists my arrogant insult? Well, basically they tell me that if it were as “easy” as I in my writing claim it to be to improve education (i.e. by letting students learn through creating value to others, and to do this by asking students to apply a toolbox of entrepreneurship methods) in order to increase engagement, motivation and deep learning in education, the scholarly field would already have come up with this. Allegedly, it is simply too good to be true, or too simplistic to make any real difference, or an eclectic collection of unfounded consultancy models, or in line with previous work that I’ve neglected, or a non-interesting ed-tech app that doesn’t add anything significant of value to practice or research. They ask me to take a step back, appreciate the complexity of education, listen more than I prescribe, refrain from making recommendations to teachers, appreciate previous research more and stop describing previous work in the field in judgmental terms.

Fair enough. I confess to being a bit harsh on current state of education, both in terms of practice and research. I have probably let my frustration over lack of progress shine through in a non-academic way. I really need to better appreciate what has already been done, and to be more careful with judgmental wording. After all, we do have some truly beautiful theories, learning principles and educational philosophies out there.

More in detail, for the sake of clarity here, I have been informed that some of my work as it is presented now doesn’t help a single teacher, that I am being merely irritating, that my writing can be viewed as an insult on decades of progressive education researchers, that I am pushing them to the floor with my work, that I am un-humble, and that I am excluding / devaluing a lot of good work with my too narrow definition of “entrepreneurial” education. It seems my attempts to clear the fuzziness in the field by being explicit is one root cause here.

So, what to do now? When, and to what extent, is it right to listen to the critics, step back and observe more, to follow the advice to be more humble? Or, if my conclusion would go the other way, when is it right to say, hey, this actually seems to work. Should I keep being explicit despite the risk of being viewed as irritating, or should I back off, observe more, be less explicit and talk less? I’ve received rather conflicting advice pointing towards either of these diverging paths. Some would perhaps argue that a little bit of both is necessary now – which is easy to agree on in theory but a difficult balancing act to make in practice.

What do you think? Tweet me, e-mail me or reply here on the blog.

NOTE: For the record, I did get a lot of positive feedback too. From many different people including my fantastic discussant Saras Sarasvathy – she was world class and gave some fantastic feed forward. But that is a different story which I might get back to later here.

In most large groups of people the focus is on performing here and now. In corporations it is stipulated by the stock market, making up its mind about performance here and now, every minute of its opening hours. In nations it is stipulated by voters who make up their mind here and now, every day in polls and media and every 3-4 years in elections. This has som dire consequences. One consequence is that focus is all about current operations. What do the newspapers write about us today? What do the customers / voters think about us right now? Seldom if ever is the focus what will be of us in 10-15 years.

I am a teacher at Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship, where we work with starting up new companies. But we also help large firms starting up new business. And it is not a walk in the park. In large corporations current operations are eating future operations for breakfast, every single day. The large pile of money that the current operations represent overshadow the small and insignificant breadcrumbs of money that the future represents today. Logically everyone understands that all big things once were small, but strangely enough the reverse logic is just so difficult to grasp.

There is a strand of research relevant here that is focusing on ambidexterity – a metaphor used for organizations and their ability to use both “hands” at the same time. If the right hand is current operations, the left hand represents the future. And most people do important stuff with their right hand, right? What researchers (such as for example O’Reilly and Tushman) say here is that balancing between the past and the future is one of the toughest challenges that managers face. And one reason most managers fail is the greater certainty of success when working with incremental improvements of past achievements. And is it anything we humans hate more than uncertainty?

Still, any firm that doesn’t work with their future will eventually die or wane. A paradox indeed, and now some empirics to back it up. 88% of Fortune 500 companies from 1955 are today gone from the list, due to bankrupcy, decline or mergers. Anyone remembers Hines Lumber, Riegel Textile, Cone Mills today? Didn’t think so. But we do remember Boeing, General Motors and IBM. And do you think that newcomers such as Facebook, Microsoft and eBay will be on the list in 60 years from now? Depends on their focus on the future, I’d say. What is lacking here according to O’Reilly and Tushman is entrepreneurial competencies. Most people possess an overflow of operational competencies, but haven’t heard of anything like being entrepreneurial in an existing organization, especially not from their education. And what is worse, incentives are almost always based on operational competencies. Intrapreneurs usually have to struggle in the dark, with little if any institutional support, let alone recognition.

Now to countries. European Union has dedicated some people to working on the issue of entrepreneurial competencies. They produce reports every year focusing on different aspects of entrepreneurial competencies. But it is a tough call to get countries to change their educational systems accordingly. Certainty of outcome in terms of easily measurable competencies (think PISA here) eats entrepreneurial competencies for breakfast every morning. This is evident in my home country Sweden, where PISA related “fix the current operations” projects get many hundreds of million SEK every year. Entrepreneurial competencies get their breadcrumbs indeed, but it merely results in cute little pockets of excellence here and there, see my report for Swedish National Agency of Education here (in Swedish, but I have an English version that I can e-mail if anyone wants to read).

Denmark has for long been a good example of a strong focus on entrepreneurial competencies, alongside UK. Denmark has had both action in schools and universities and researchers following these processes. Many of the leading scholars in my field work in Denmark, and they have one of Europe’s largest research centers on entrepreneurial competencies in education, called iCARE at Aarhus University, read about them here (I’m going to Aarhus next week to learn from them). But times are tough in Denmark, and government spending has had to be cut lately. What better then than to deprioritize the future? We know what we have, let’s focus on that. Let someone else deal with the future. The government has just decided to put a zero in the spending to entrepreneurial competencies in education, down from 30m DKK yearly, or 4m EUR yearly. The organization in charge of these activities in Denmark, “Danish foundation for entrepreneurship”, got really scared and wrote about it here (in Danish). I’d propose that Danish policymakers see their decision as taking a loan from the future, with loan shark interest rate. Denmark will likely pay interest on this loan for the decades to come, in terms of school drop-outs, social care costs, lower start-up rates and other kinds of interest rate that the future will stipulate for them.

As a general reflection, I see this as the usual neglect of the future. It’s a human fallacy, a pattern that we so often follow, despite its very logical consequences. It is the easiest decision to take, because nothing happens short term. And it feels safe, focusing on what can be improved here and now. Long term however, it is the path to death. At least for corporations. Countries seldom die, but they are likely affected in other detrimental ways. But then again, perhaps I am just a boring and too anxious person, over-emphasizing worries about the future. Let’s live in the present day. Who knows what and who will die in the future anyway? And who cares? Let’s go for a beer, it’s Friday!

Just finalized my PhD thesis for the “end seminar”, i.e. the final test before I get the PhD badge. After six years I ended up proposing a new educational philosophy grounded in entrepreneurship. Strangely enough no-one seems to have proposed such a thing before. Please do correct me if I’m wrong here. And what would yet another educational philosophy be good for then? Might you ask yourself. Well, educational philosophies are teachers’ more or less silent wayfinders in a complex life of teaching. Some teachers are aware of this, others are not. And when teachers are asked by EU, OECD, World Bank or some national / regional / local educational policymakers to infuse entrepreneurship into education, they more or less unknowingly resort to educational philosophies. Here’s how it often goes.

“I’m gonna let my students work actively in teams on authentic problems, allowing them to learn in self-directed ways – isn’t that entrepreneurial pedagogy?” A teacher might ask. No, that’s progressive education. Invented centuries ago. “But what about taking students to a study visit, or even an internship where they can work at a start-up or at least meet the founders of some company, isn’t that entrepreneurial pedagogy?” Another teacher might ask. No, that’s experiential education. Invented in the middle of the 20:th century, or earlier, but at least described in detail in that century.

So what is then “entrepreneurial” in entrepreneurial education? Well, the answer to that is not easy to say. Unfortunately there is no “right” answer, only opinions. And for lack of a clearly elaborated set of opinions, which we sometimes call an “educational philosophy”, teachers end up constructing their own personal teaching philosophy that might do the job, but more often not, unfortunately. In fact, entrepreneurial education is most times a failure – leading to marginal approaches decoupled from core curriculum and relevant only to a very small minority of students, mainly on higher levels of education. But at least, failure is not alone in this case.  It is shared by centuries of failure for progressive educators around the world. As Labaree says – it has indeed shaped how we talk about education, but not what teachers do.

An educational philosophy is inherently prescriptive, a coherent set of beliefs. This is what I have tried to design in my thesis work, but this time for the first (?) time based on entrepreneurship theory and practice. I’ve developed a set of carefully chosen and hopefully coherent set of beliefs that teachers can apply when designing their “entrepreneurial” pedagogies. I don’t claim it to be the “right” or “only” set of beliefs possible, just one set of beliefs that teachers can use. If they like. It goes like this: Let students learn by applying their existing and future competencies to create something preferably novel of value to at least one external stakeholder outside their group, class or school / university. Or in short: learning-through-creating-value-for-others. It represents a more clear answer to a question most progressive and experiential educators struggle with: learning-by-doing-what?

It was developed through a five-year research process of constant iterations between theory and practice. A total of nine empirical studies on all levels of education were drawn from, involving a few hundred primary, secondary, tertiary and continuing education teachers, around 2000 students and around 100 different educational institutions in three European countries working entrepreneurially to varying extent. In addition to a new educational philosophy, it also resulted in a number of methodological developments, such as a new “proxy” theory of assessing entrepreneurial education, a mobile app based interview technique and frameworks for emotional events and entrepreneurial competencies.

If you want to read the thesis, just drop me an email or tweet me, and I’ll send it to you. If you prefer to keep it short, here is a summary of it. The end seminar is on Nov 6:th at Chalmers from 13-15. It’s open to the public if you want to chime in and hear what the discussant Saras Sarasvathy has to say about the thesis. The dissertation defense is planned for spring 2016, if Saras likes what she sees, that is.

I will never forget the day I met Dénis Gregoire, an entrepreneurship researcher who deliberately stopped doing research in entrepreneurial education. We met in 2011 at the BCERC conference in Syracuse, USA. I had read his work with admiration, and was indeed starstruck when I met him at one of the evening receptions. What he said has stayed with me ever since: “Ah, so you are doing research in entrepreneurship education! Very interesting field indeed. But it has no future, so I have had to leave it” (or something along those lines, I did not have ny dictaphone on). And indeed he has left: his last cited article on the topic according to his Google Scholar profile is from 2007.

Stubborn and new to doing research (I was an IT entrepreneur for a decade prior to signing up for PhD studies), I was not put down by his comment, but pursued research explicitly and exclusively focused on entrepreneurial education in its many shapes ever since (i.e. both enterprise and entrepreneurship education). But now, four years later, his comment has started to reappear in my head again. And I will try to summarize why.

How a scholarly field evolves

Burbules has stated (here) that the development of a scholarly field is determined not only by what research is done and what findings emerge, but also by who is included and excluded through the conditions set up by journals, conferences, editors and reviewers. Each decision to include or exclude a contribution / contributor shapes the future of that field. And while rejects are being issued every day in the academic field and need to be considered a part of the painstaking process of doing research, their stated reasons also say something about the future of a field. In his case it was Burbules’ own scholarly field “philosophy of education” which in the 1980s had come to realize that it had excluded women over a period of several decades. Indeed a limitation for a scholarly field to only include male contributors. If you were a woman in a Philosophy of Education conference evening reception in the 70s, someone could certainly have said something in line with Gregoire’s comment, had it been a woman talking to another woman new to the field: “There is no future for women in this field”.

ETP: “Don’t even think about it – we WILL desk reject you!”

Back in 2012 one of the leading journals in entrepreneurship (ETP) put up a note on their website that they no longer accepted any contributions in entrepreneurship education. It was later taken down, but it sent a powerful message to the research community. Don’t bother us at ETP with any educationally relevant findings. We don’t want them in our fine entrepreneurship journal. And sadly it makes sense. For a scholarly field to reach academic legitimacy, it must keep clear lines between what counts and what does not count as part of that field. Entrepreneurship has its own academic legitimacy problems it needs to take care of. And education obviously is a very different field from entrepreneurship, so the message was logical. And it added to Gregoire’s statement of the scholarly dead-end of entrepreneurial education.

Some recent failures

What made me think of Gregoire this year was my soon-to-come PhD defense, meaning that I need to hand in those last couple of articles for publication attempt. I emailed a contact at one of the leading journals in my field, one of the very few ones with ambitions beyond entrepreneurship (AMLE), to ask if they were interested in my work. The reply was disappointing, and with implications beyond my own work. The study objects in my work were not entrepreneurs or business school students but students in primary education, so the editor was not interested whatsoever. Go see a general learning journal was the polite reply. So now we know that in order to be relevant for top journals in the scholarly field of entrepreneurial education, we need to be careful not to pick the wrong kind of students to study. This is exactly the kind of interdependence Burbules talks about, now shaping the scholarly field of entrepreneurial education. Who knows how many rejects have been issued, by AMLE and by others, due to “wrong” dataset in the interdisciplinary field of entrepreneurial education, or due to other delimitations deemed necessary to stay within the narrow confines of “entrepreneurship”?

Next up was an attempt to get a paper accepted in a special issue by another leading journal (JSBM). This time they had explicitly asked for contributions that addressed the disconnect between entrepreneurship and education. Great! Let’s submit. And so we did, and got a “revise & resubmit” in April, happy so far. But then in second round we were rejected. And why? Well, for many reasons probably, but a primary reason was that our paper was addressing the wrong audience – educators. It was not deemed to be within the audience of the journal, which is arguably entrepreneurship, or “small business” as the journal title reads. So not even when a special issue editor asks explicitly for interdisciplinary contributions it is okay to be just that – interdisciplinary. In addition to that, the main reviewer rejecting us asked how we could posit that Customer Development by Steve Blank was entrepreneurship and how we could assume that a reader was familiar with Sarasvathy’s work. Some dark part of me wanted to reply: “Let me Google that for you”, but by then the scholary discussion was already over. For the sake of openness to readers to make your own interpretation, I provide the full review here. It constituted the only viewpoint on which the decision to reject was taken. Its resentful style could be viewed as rather amusing, had it not been for my career taking a further step down the drain from it and leaving other interdisciplinary ent-ed researchers at similar peril.

Be careful out there!

The learning generated from this anecdote has implications far beyond our little contribution attempt. This was likely a reviewer anchored in education, and thereby not so well versed into the scholarly field of entrepreneurship. It seems not only doing research is difficult in an interdisciplinary field, so is reviewing and editing such work. You would perhaps need to double the amount of reviewers – two from education and two from entrepreneurship – since neither field arguably understands its neighboring galaxy (yes, they are that far apart these two domains). And have both a guest editor and main editor committed to interdisciplinary work, which seems to have lacked in this case. Otherwise you risk ending up in a situation of the deaf trying to communicate with the blind and vice versa – leading expert in one field, not even novice in another.

This leaves entrepreneurial education scholars with no high ranked outlet for their work. And in academia you will not survive for long without at least one or two articles in a relatively high ranked journal. Performativity requirements are being enforced everywhere. So you leave the field. Or you die sooner or later as a scholar in the field by being ejected from the system for non-performance. Or you have it as a hobby. That is what Gregoire saw in 2011, and that is what I now see too in 2015.

Some survival strategies

One of my articles is about two distinct flavors of entrepreneurial education – egoistic versus altruistic. We want it into a high ranked journal, so we are considering to cleanse it from any mention of education. Given that it is a requirement for all top journals. That way we at least have a chance of getting it into a leading journal, and stay in scholarly business as researchers. Another way to survive is to do quantitative research with massive randomized controlled trials. But while that method renders highly publishable work, you end up on the far side of the rigor versus relevance scale. Such results are thus not deemed so useful for practitioners according to many educational researchers (I won’t bore you with a long list of references here, but check out Reeves here). It is a way to stay in business, but perhaps not a scholarly way to make an impact on educational practice.

Another option is to do research outside of the academic system. And that path I am also testing. Some of my largest studies are done from my newly started research methodology venture. But that is not something we can count on many scholars to do. Instead we will likely see a strait jacket development of the field for many years to come. And the continuous stream of lower ranked journals accepting a wide stream of articles with varying quality (some very good indeed).

A final option I will test before putting out the light is to try getting published in top education journals. But if their understanding and appreciation of the scholarly field of entrepreneurship is as low as evidenced above, it will turn out to be yet another dead-end. Indeed, the educational researchers in my home country of Sweden have been frowning at entrepreneurship entering their field ever since they heard about it, probably asking themselves “What can those capitalists possibly contribute with that we haven’t already thought about?”. When you are done explaining the most basic aspects of how entrepreneurship indeed can contribute, you will most likely have run into the 8000 words limit, excluding a possibility to also make a novel contribution.

POST EDIT: Stuck in the middle with you

This blogpost generated a fair amount of feedback through social media when initially posted. Researchers from more than one European country outside my own stated that they very much recognized their own situation in the above description. One had been advised to leave the field since it was deemed uninteresting by many editors of leading journals. Another had tried publishing in educational journals instead, but had encountered similar interdisciplinary challenges but from the other end. Yet another had received good advice from education journal editors, which signifies that it could be a viable survival strategy – of course depending on university policy at those places you are employed today or where you want to get employed in the future. Many entrepreneurship scholars are limited by what ABS ranking stipulates, which limits possible action. From this we can conclude that entrepreneurial education will in the forseeable future repel talented scholars and thereby limit its progress as a scholarly field of study. Practice will thereby have to continue spearheading any developments, leading to a continued theory deficit in the field – particlulary learning and education theory.

After six years of action-based research on entrepreneurial education I am about to finalize my doctoral thesis. It will be about value creation as a new educational philosophy, or learning-by-(using-knowledge-for)-creating-value-(to-others). I view this as an attempt to build on Dewey’s educational philosophy of learning-by-doing, trying to give a more firm answer to the question Learning-by-Doing-WHAT? Or, what should we let our students do in order for them to learn more in-depth and also to develop entrepreneurial competencies?

I have made a 10-minute video about it in English here and in Swedish here. I have also written a summary of entrepreneurial education for OECD where I outline many of my perspectives on this educational philosophy. The English version is here, and the Swedish version is here. I’ve also recently written a working paper outlining some differences between self-focused and others-focused entrepreneurial education, read it here.

The usual case for a doctoral thesis is that it will be read by almost nobody. The usual reader frequency is about 2 people – the opponent and the supervisor. This time however I know that there are people out there who are interested in this educational philosophy already. Some have  started using it explicitly, whereas others are already working like this but not labeling it learning-by-creating-value.

Therefore I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask for some help with my doctoral thesis. I have formulated a couple of questions below. Any attempt to give answers to these questions is highly appreciated. E-mail me, comment on the blog, Tweet me or call me. I have also made a web survey where you can type your thoughts on these matters, please find it here. Here are the questions:

Why is it so rare for teachers to ask of their students to create value to people outside class? I have discussed this question on page 12 in my latest working paper “Two Flavors of Entrepreneurial Education”, which you can find here. My guess so far is that it is a combination of a couple of reasons. One possible explanation could  be  that  today’s  teachers  view  themselves  as  suppliers  of  knowledge  and  view  their  students  as customers, i.e. a “students-as-takers” culture.  So the idea of regarding them as givers of value to others never crosses their mind. Another explanation could be that adults don’t perceive youths as capable of delivering value to outside stakeholders, and therefore seldom give them a chance to even try.

Why do students get more motivated and learn more in-depth from creating value to others? Much of my work has been about discussing how, when and why students learn when they create value to others. For example, in my lastest working paper linked above I have dug into motivation theory to try to find answers to this. But from a very practical point of view, what is the difference here? Any reflections are appreciated here!

How can we get more teachers to work with value creation pedagogy? While it is perhaps a nice idea in theory to let our students learn by creating value to others, how do we get our fellow teachers to start applying it in their classrooms? Educational change is perhaps one of the most challenging issues in our education system today. So what are the challenges that need to be overcome? What are the neat tips and tricks that get it going in practice? How can we increase the rate of adoption among teachers and schools?

What are the most illustrative examples of value creation pedagogy out there? We humans understand by example. When we hear about how something is applied in practice in a concrete way, we get what it is all about. So what are the most illustrative and insightful examples of value creation pedagogy out there? What value was created, for whom, and why? What did the students learn from it, and how did it connect to curriculum content? How was each student supported and assessed by the teacher, during the process and afterwards?

Please continue to my web survey and give me some much needed answers and reflections:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/2179758/Help-me-develop-a-new-educational-philosophy

We humans like when things go our way. When we don’t end up in unexpected trouble, when we don’t end up as prime target for angry rallying people. We prefer smooth operation, and a moderate level of change. I think this is a main reason why truly entrepreneurial education is very rare in education today. Without using proper tools, entrepreneurial education is often a recipe for teachers ending up in trouble, stress and calendar strain due to the complexity of interacting with the world outside schools and universities. Therefore, most teachers don’t make their teaching as entrepreneurial as they perhaps would like to, out of self-preservation. Why mess up your life? Why not just do what the system expects in terms of traditional chalk-and-talk and keep your calendar open to family, leisure and relative calmness.

My working definition of entrepreneurial education is when we let students use their knowledge to create something of value to stakeholders outside our school / university. This requires relations to be established with such stakeholders, a time-consuming job that someone has to assume responsibility for. My way of solving this is to let my students establish these relations themselves, on behalf of our university. They generally like this a lot, but it always results in both strong positive and strong negative feelings. When people from the outside world like what the students are doing it leads to strong personal growth, pride and a feeling of meaningfulness and relevancy (and of course deep learning of curriculum content). When on the other hand these same external people dislike what happens in the collaboration process, and from time to time things end up troublesome, the students’ emotions are rather characterized by strong anguish, discontent and distress. The same thing happens when the outcome of the process is uncertain. To most people, uncertainty is really scary. And what happens then is that their resulting emotions need an outlet. Who better to direct these negative emotions to than to your own teacher? After all, it is the teacher’s fault that the course is not as structured and predictable as all the other courses provided by other teachers. And why the hell can’t the teacher just tell me what will happen now? At Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship we have seen this every single year for two decades now. Indeed, when I was a student here myself, I was one of the most emotionally explicit students, rallying againsts my teachers a lot.

I often try to tell both my fellow teachers and our students that negative emotions are an important part of entrepreneurial pedagogy, and that it is a good sign that we are doing something quite right. This does not always lead to people calming down, neither my colleagues, my students nor myself. I wonder how I had reacted to such an “excuse” for educational messiness and ambiguity 15 years ago when I was pouring my own anguish and distress over my teachers.

Yesterday I found myself (again) in front of ten students rejecting my attempts to explain that negative emotions are natural to the process – “This is entrepreneurship!”, “This is what you signed up for!”, I tried to say. Rejecting this, they instead asked me to confess all my mistakes made as a teacher during the last six months. And boy did I confess. “Sorry for putting you in such an ambiguous situation with outside stakeholders holding you accountable. Sorry for trying to give you a really good educational experience, it was all my fault. And I even did it on purpose, knowing how bad you would feel about it. Let’s all go back to traditional class-room lecturing with no real-life content. Then you can get your 100% waterproof course-PM. You will know exactly what will happen, every minute of it all.”

I don’t know if they forgave me. They are probably still upset with me. So I thought i’d write this text to reflect on it. One good thing that we have now that didn’t exist 15 years ago is the entrepreneurial toolbox of effectuation, customer development, appreciative inquiry, design thinking etc. I think this can be a way to simplify for the teacher and streamline the complex and emotional roller-coaster process that entrepreneurial education can result in. It could also serve as an explanatory base for the students, to show them what they are experiencing and why they feel so bad about it. One of my favourite quotes is from Blank: “If you are not prepared to fail, you are destined to do so”. Read more about these tools here in my paper for OECD on entrepreneurship in education, or watch my short 10-minute videos about it here.

But entrepreneurial and experiential education will keep leading to emotionally distressed students at times. And what should they do with their negative emotions? Whose responsibility is it to cure them from their uncertainty and ambiguity fever? And what is the best way to break the news? Ideas anyone?

Two years of writing and testing out my ideas in practice in the municipality of Sundsvall, Sweden, have now taken me to finalize an article and submit it to a scientific journal for publication. The idea put forward is that tools from the entrepreneurship domain can help teachers bridge between traditional and “progressive” pedagogy, allowing for combining standardized curriculum with individual students’ needs and abilities. This is one of the most important challenges in education according to Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor in education.

In the article I also outline and define the idea of value creation as pedagogy, or “learning-by-creating-value” that we have worked with at Chalmers for two decades, and that has the potential to be used on all levels of education, from preschool to university. This idea has been adopted by the people I work with in Sundsvall, see their video in Swedish here, and their website here.

If you want to read it, send me an email and I could probably send it to you. Since it is in double-blinded peer review right now I cannot post it here.

Today I will be speaker at a webinar hosted by OECD, topic is a practitioner paper I have done for OECD on Entrepreneurship in Education – what is it, why to do it, when to do it, how to do it. Attendees are researchers, teachers and school managers from around Europe interested in the topic. It is a preparation for a conference in Berlin in November where around 100 researchers, school principals and teachers will spend a week to discuss entrepreneurship in education. All of these activities are part of the Entrepreneurship360 project hosted by OECD, read more here.

In this webinar I will be focusing on what entrepreneurship is, why it is relevant and why it is often neglected, and how to do it in practice when applying a “value creation as pedagogy approach”. My slides for the webinar can be found here: Webinar OECD 141024.

Tomorrow I am in Sundsvall talking to around 200 school management people.  My task is to give a background on entrepreneurial education / learning, and to propose some ideas for the future to school managers in Sundsvall in their ambitious mission to become Sweden’s most successful school municipality by the year 2021 in a prestigious ranking by SKL. They found me through a Youtube film I published 1,5 years ago on my research, and they have identified my idea of learning-by-creating-value as an interesting strategy to achieve educational excellence (the idea is outlined in my dissertation here). It goes well with their focus on improving the value creation ability of the public sector in Sundsvall, a mission articulated by the “managing director” of Sundsvall, Stefan Söderlund. I have spent the last couple of weeks outlining three ideas that hopefully can inspire them to achieve their goals. These three ideas are outlined below.

Idea 1: Focus on the how-to question. Articulating ambitious goals is the easy part, whereas the difficult part is identifying stategies that really work. Drawing on my proxy theory stipulating that instead of focusing on the entrepreneurial competencies, we should focus on the critical events leading to developed entrepreneurial competencies. Applied to general schooling this means that school authorities should identify critical events that they believe create a superior school, and then steer the schools towards generating such critical events, for example making students interact with the outside world, create value to outside stakeholders and work for prolonged time in teams, preferably months or even years.

Idea 2: Change perspective on value creation. Instead of asking outside stakeholders to create value to the students by participating in class and giving guest lectures etc, students should be asked to create value to external stakeholders, leading to deep learning and increased sense of meaningfulness and relevancy. Here I relate to John F Kennedy’s famous quote “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.

Idea 3: Measure in new ways. Beating the competition means you have to innovate. An old saying is that what you measure is also what you get. So if you want to improve your results one way can be to try articulating novel indicators of success and measure them across the entire municipality with novel IT-based methods, replacing the good old yearly student questionnaire on goal-related factors. I propose an integration of the three aspects formative assessment, systemic quality assurance and in-depth project outcome review. This approach is based on my research recently published on an emotion based approach to assessing entrepreneurial education, published here.

These three ideas could hopefully inspire some people in Sundsvall. Here are my slides (Framtidsinspiration Sundsvall 140917 handouts) in Swedish from my talk. Please come back to me in seven years and I will tell you if they made it to the top!

An intriguing master thesis was completed just before summer by one of our students at Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship, read it here. The student, Christoffer Kjernald, had taken a theory from my research and tested it on his classmates. He labeled it “the proxy theory”, and it basically says that activities can be used as a proxy for assessing development of entrepreneurial competencies. Instead of assessing the entrepreneurial competencies themselves which is very difficult, the assessment could focus on certain kinds of activities leading to the development of entrepreneurial competencies, such as meeting potential customers, presenting for investors, managing other master thesis students and searching for funding. The proxy theory is described in-depth in my dissertation here and in a published article here.

By interviewing 12 fellow classmates approaching the end of their education, Christoffer uncovered a list of 12 different kinds of activity that they stated to be important for their own learning at the entrepreneurship program. The two most important activities were working with the same group of people for a long time and meeting potential customers in an early phase. This is in line with my own research having found that interaction with the outside world and team-work experiences are two of the most important kinds of events leading to development of entrepreneurial competencies, see my dissertation here. He also furthers my research by specifying that different kinds of presentations to others generate different kinds of learning. Presenting in front of classmates generates different kinds of learning than presenting for potential customers. And presenting for potential investors generated a third kind of learning, different from the learning generated when presenting for classmates and customers. This implies that when we label student presentations as a teaching technique, we are describing it way too shallow. The audience and context are very important factors for which learning outcomes are generated among the students.

He further found that out of these 12 different kinds of activity, only five of them are explicitly assessed at our master program today. While we today are assessing if the students make cold calls, make school presentations and meet their idea providers, we do not assess whether they make customer presentations, search for funding, manage other master thesis students or take major decisions. As Christoffer points out it is perhaps not so easy assessing activities that are not experienced by all teams. It could also lower the motivation and engagement if students are not doing these activities on their own initiative, but as part of a formal assessment. Still, it is highly interesting to see that activitiy based assessment holds much further potential here at Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship. What does this imply for education programs where activity based assessment is not at all used today? Perhaps this is a straightforward and smooth way of increasing the level of entrepreneurial competencies being developed among students in many different kinds of education and age.