Description
During in this such a brief elucidation about inspiring the inner entrepreneur in students a case study of entrepreneurship studies.
Proceedings of the 6
th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
INSPIRING THE INNER ENTREPRENEUR IN STUDENTS – A CASE
STUDY OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP STUDIES IN TUAS
Juha Kontio
Turku University of Applied Sciences
ABSTRACT
This paper introduces a case study of the entrepreneurship studies in the Faculty of
Telecommunication and e-Business at Turku University of Applied Sciences. There are three
levels of entrepreneurship studies in our faculty: a) What is entrepreneurship? –to raise the
awareness and motivation towards entrepreneurship, b) Student co-operatives and Support
centres for training the students with the skills to manage and run business and c) Become and
entrepreneur. We describe existing recommendations for higher education to organize
entrepreneurship and also reflect our solutions to these recommendations.
KEYWORDS (4-6 )
Entrepreneurship, Case study, CDIO Standard 7, CDIO Standard 8
INTRODUCTION
Entrepreneurship is increasingly recognised as an important driver of economic growth,
productivity, innovation and employment. The importance of entrepreneurship to Europe and
Finland has been identified in many reports and studies published since 2000. The European
Union’s Lisbon Strategy stated for example that new firms and SMEs are the major sources of
growth and new jobs [1]. Furthermore, the European Commission's Green Paper
"Entrepreneurship in Europe" in 2003 stated that education should contribute to encouraging
entrepreneurship, by fostering the right mindset, awareness of career opportunities as an
entrepreneur and skills [2]. Another European Commission’s report emphasized the same issue
“Europe needs to stimulate the entrepreneurial mindsets of young people”. This report defines
entrepreneurship as something that refers to an individual’s ability to turn ideas into action.
Therefore it is a key competence for all, helping young people to be more creative and self-
confident in whatever they undertake. [3] In addition, Eurobarometer reports that almost 75
percent of interviewed teaching professionals agree that study and training programmes should
encompass more generic competences, such as communication, teamwork and
entrepreneurship. [4] The education can have different objectives such as: a) developing
entrepreneurial drive among students (raising awareness and motivation); b) training students in
the skills they need to set up a business and manage its growth; and c) developing the
entrepreneurial ability to identify and exploit opportunities. Actually, an important disctinction can
be made to entrepreneurial and entrepreneurship education and training. The entrepreneurial
education and training can apply to all forms of education, and entrepreneurship education and
training is specifically concerned with new venture creation and innovation. [5] In Finland a
challenge has been low number of small companies and low interest in starting new companies.
For example the national innovation strategy has recommended that teaching facilitating and
encouraging business and entrepreneurship must be introduced at the core of teaching. [6]
Proceedings of the 6
th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
Nowadays the role of entrepreneurship in higher education is clear. Many HEIs have recognised
that entrepreneurship courses could indeed be an effective tool for them to stimulate the
economy through their graduates [7]. In addition, students consider entrepreneurship education
an important part of their studies [8]. The policy of the Finnish Ministry of Education declares that
supporting entrepreneurship requires widening, diversifying and strenghening education in
entrepreneurship. Studies of entrepreneurship are offered as alternative studies to all students
and students’ credits earned in R&D-projects will be doubled. [9] Students in higher education
should be activated to start their own enterprises. Actually, every higher education institute
should have a policy to motivate and offer support for becoming an entrepreneur, to increase
innovations and to provide chances for business growth [10]. We don’t ask any more whether
we can teach entrepreneurship rather how we can best learn and teach it. Still, implementing
innovative entrepreneurship education programs has significant challenges and the rewards are
difficult to quantify [11]. Entrepreneurship education should focus upon developing
understanding, and capacity for pursuit, of entrepreneurial behaviours, skills and attributes in
widely different contexts. Nevertheless it demands considerable changes in pedagogy, modes of
assessment and the appropriate training of staff. [12]
This paper describes a case study of adding studies of entrepreneurship in higher education in
the faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business at the Turku University of Applied Sciences.
First, we describe the case research this paper is all about. Second, we introduce different
recommendations for higher education in entrepreneurship education. Third, we describe
entrepreneurship education in engineering. Fourth, we explain the entrepreneurship education
model in our case. Finally, we will discuss and reflect our efforts with the theorethical part of the
paper. Hopefully, we can also provide ideas to promote entrepreneurship education in
engineering programs.
THE RESEARCH
This research used qualitative methods and is a descriptive case study. The study describes
actions taken in the faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business at the Turku University of
Applied Sciences for inspiring our students to entrepreneurship. In general, a case study aims
for in depth-understanding of the context of the phenomenon [13]. Furthermore, a descriptive
case study presents a complete description of a phenomenon within its context [14]. A case
study is well-suited to capturing the knowledge of practioners and to document the experiences
of practice [15]. This paper follows interpretative tradition of the case research. It means that
there is no objective reality, which can be discovered by researchers and replicated by others
[16, 17].
Turku University of Applied Sciences is one of the biggest of its kind in Finland. Our University is
organized in six faculties that promote multidisciplinary learning. The faculty of
Telecommunication and e-Business represent four different fields of education: technology,
business, natural sciences and culture. Our main goal is to work in close co-operation with our
region and to answer to the requirements of the working life. Our education and our research
and development initiatives focus on applying knowledge rather than creating new ones.
The faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business operates in two cities and has seven different
degree programs (Table 1). We educate Masters of Engineering, Bachelors of Engineering and
Bachelors of Business Administration. The Bachelor of Engineering is a four year degree with
240 ECTS and Bachelor of Business Administration is a three and half year degree with 210
ECTS. The Master of Engineering program is a 60 credit program for students having at least
Proceedings of the 6
th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
three years of work experience after the Bachelor degree. The faculty has approximately 1500
students of which roughly 550 study in Salo campus and 950 in Turku campus.
Table 1:
Degree programs in Telecommunication and e-Business.
Degree Program Credits
ECTS
Discipline Students
Technological Competence
Management
60 Engineering 60
Information Technology
- English
- Finnish
240 Engineering 600
Electronics 240 Engineering 270
Business Information Technology 210 Information Systems 170
Business and Administration 210 Business 200
Library and Information Services 210 Information Services 70
Entrepreneurship is one of the focus areas in our mission statement: The faculty of
Telecommunication and e-Business operates interactively with the working life educating future
international experts, activating entrepreneurship and developing our region with applied
research. The main research question answered in this paper was: How do we inspire our
students for entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial attitude?
ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION RECOMMENDATIONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
Europe’s competitiveness, innovation and economic growth depend on being able to produce
future leaders with the skills and attitudes to be entrepreneurial in their professional lives,
whether by creating their own companies or innovating in larger organisations. Entrepreneurship
education is the first and arguably the most important step for embedding an innovative culture
in Europe. [18] At the same time, the European Commission’s report declares that currently the
teaching of entrepreneurship is not yet sufficiently integrated in higher education institutions'
curricula [3]. Clearly, for entrepreneurship to embrace the 21st century, educators must become
more competent in the use of academic technology, and also expand their pedagogies to
include new and innovative approaches to the teaching of entrepreneurship [19].
The Ministry of Education Finland has introduced three paths to entrepreneurship in higher
education. First path stems from the intention to become an entrepreneur: the intention requires
strong expertise if we hope it to really happen. Second path starts from an invention or from a
product-/serviceidea. When significant market potential is identified, this might strenghthen
person’s intention to entrepreneurship and lead to a start-up company. Third path is based on
research result that has entrepreneurial potention. Growth-oriented entrepreneurship can start
from this path. Figure describes how intentions, innovations and growth entrepreneurship are
linked together. [10]
Proceedings of the 6
th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
Figure 1. Entrepreneurship in higher education [10].
According to Ministry of Education Finland higher education institutions should offer a range of
courses in entrepreneurship, rather than settling on a particular model of delivery. Especially in
the early stages of promoting entrepreneurship education, it is better to have a diverse range of
provision: options that students can take! [3]
Higher education institutions could [3]:
? set up a strategy and an action plan for teaching and research in entrepreneurship,
embedding practice-based activities, and for new venture start-ups and spin-offs;
? create an entrepreneurship education department, which would serve as an
entrepreneurial hub within the institution and spread the teaching of entrepreneurship
across all other departments;
? offer an introduction to entrepreneurship and self-employment to all undergraduate
students during their first year. In addition, give all students the opportunity to attend
seminars and lectures in this subject;
? set up incentive systems to motivate and reward faculty staff in supporting students
interested in entrepreneurship, and acknowledge the academic value of research and
activities in the entrepreneurial field;
? develop clear institutional rules about intellectual property;
? award academic credits for practical work on enterprise projects outside the established
courses.
The OECD report gives four main recommendations to higher education institutes [18, 20]:
1. Scale up
? Increase the number of courses in entrepreneurship and the number of students
participating in them, particularly in lagging countries and institutions.
? Extend teaching across the HEI to address a wider range of potential entrepreneurs,
moving beyond the traditional nucleus of entrepreneurship courses in university business
schools. Offer courses to potential entrepreneurs in creative industries, science and
technology and other fields and to both postgraduates and undergraduates.
? Integrate entrepreneurship teaching with subject-specific degree content in order to draw
on the business ideas and expertise that emerge from the subject interests of students
(medicine, biology, creative industries
Proceedings of the 6
th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
? etc).
? Consider using inter-disciplinary entrepreneurship programmes to reach a wider range of
students and obtain cross-fertilisation benefits from the mixing of students from different
disciplines in the same courses and project teams, whilst retaining economies of scale.
? Expand the pool of entrepreneurship teachers. Provide training, encouragement and
support for staff embarking on entrepreneurshipteaching activities. Facilitating teaching
activities by existing and former entrepreneurs by relaxing regulations constraining their
involvement and training entrepreneurs in teaching techniques.
2. Focus on growth-oriented entrepreneurship
? Shift from traditional entrepreneurship teaching focused on business management to
courses aimed at stimulating growth-oriented entrepreneurship. Focus courses on key
growth challenges, including finance and internationalisation.
? Teach the skills that will be required for enterprise growth including opportunity
identification, risk-taking, strategy making, leadership, negotiation, networking, building
strategic alliances and intellectual property protection.
3. Introduce interactive and experiential teaching methods
? Encourage learning-by-doing in contrast to more traditional forms of academic learning.
? Increase the use of Internet and computer technologies.
? Introduce cross-functional problem-solving approaches that replicate the bundle of
activities and functions that need to be applied in entrepreneurship situations, rather than
breaking up teaching into separate business functions as in traditional management
courses.
? Involve entrepreneurs in the design and teaching of entrepreneurship courses.
? Expose students to entrepreneur role models, for example by usingentrepreneurs as
mentors, speakers and interview subjects.
? Provide students with opportunities for working in existing SMEs and adding value to
these firms through placements and consulting projects.
? Expand the use of case study teaching. Provide resources to develop cases tailored to
the environment that students will face. Provide training to support teachers to use this
approach.
4. Link into wider networks
? Tap into the resources of alumni networks to help fund and support entrepreneurship
programmes, for example by providing teachers and links to companies for placements,
mentors and so on. Monitor and build relationships with alumni to this end.
? Facilitate access to common materials and sharing of good practice by favouring
networking among institutions and teachers and providing support for the inter-institution
mobility of entrepreneurship teachers.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION
It is no surprise that majority of entrepreneurship courses are offered in business schools [18]
[3]. However, it is questionable whether Business Schools are the most appropriate place to
teach entrepreneurship: innovative and viable business ideas are more likely to arise from
technical, scientific and creative studies [3]. Entrepreneurship needs to be expanded across the
campus - especially to the technology and science departments, where many innovative ideas
and companies originate. Technical and scientific universities are potential sources of start-ups
and spin-offs. Increasingly, business and technical faculties are linking efforts to encourage the
exchange of skills and ideas among students. [18] The real challenge is to build inter-disciplinary
approaches, making entrepreneurship education accessible to all students, creating teams for
Proceedings of the 6
th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
the development and exploitation of business ideas, mixing students from economic and
business studies with students from other faculties and with different backgrounds.[3]
Most of the possible contents of entrepreneurship courses are relevant for students from all
fields of studies. However, in order for the teaching to be tailored to the specific needs of
different categories, more emphasis is placed on one aspect or another, for instance:
Entrepreneurship within science and technology studies is especially concerned with exploiting
intellectual property, creating spin-off companies and venturing, and offers courses on issues
such as [3]:
? management techniques
? marketing, commercialising and selling of technology based ideas
? patenting and protecting technology based ideas
? financing and internationalising high-tech ventures.
A large number of Finnish engineering education professionals worked for a report defining
future competences that are not in the focus of engineering education at the moment. One of the
three key challenges was to increase business competences: attitude to entrepreneurship,
business operations, marketing, selling, productization and usability.[21] Another Finnish report
challenges Universities of Applied Sciences to provide tools for new entrepreneurship. The
Universities of Applied Sciences are expected to differentiate from science universities at least in
four dimensions: learning by doing, entrepreneurship education, high quality teaching and
personal guidance. [22]
The CDIO initiative has many references to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial education.
Standards 7 (Integrated Learning Experiences) and 8 (Active Learning) both promote
entrepreneurial competences such as creative and critical thinking. The CDIO Syllabus has
section 4.2. dedicated to enterprise and business context.
ENTREPRENEURIAL AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION IN OUR FACULTY
The strategy of Turku University of Applied Sciences defines that entrepreneurship and applied
research and development will be connected to teaching. The University tries to actively inspire
the inner entrepreneur and increase number of enterprises. The entrepreneurship is
characterized as expert entrepreneurship. Furthermore the strategy defines that business
studies will be increased in all disciplines. [23] Our faculty’s model for entrepreneurship
education has three phases:
1. What is entrepreneurship?: Practice Enterprise + Real life projects
2. Learn real entrepreneurship in safe environment: Student cooperatives + Education
Support Center
3. Become an entrepreneur: Personal Mentors + Student competitions
The first phase in our model is called “What is entrepreneurship?”. As the name defines this first
phase focuses on intentions and for providing basic information about entrepreneurship. The
main method in the first phase is Practise Enterprise –module [3] where the basics of business
operations are studies in small multidisciplinary groups using problem-based learning. The
Practise Enterprise –module is 15 credits. The module has been running since 2001 and it has
yearly sharpened to the current format. Most of our students do this course as part of first year
studies, but in engineering the students are typically third-year students. The established
practice enterprises operate in a virtual practice enterprise network (see www.europen.info)
where everything else is like real life except money and goods are not moving anywhere. The
Proceedings of the 6
th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
fundamental idea is that instead of just sitting on lectures students now learn basic laws and
ways of business in a pragmatic way. At the same time they learn internal entrepreneurship,
teamwork, project work, tolerance for uncertainty and they learn to plan their work.
There is always a true enterprise behind every practice enterprise and this practice enterprise
receives all basic information like data about the cost structure from the godfather enterprise.
The students work in their practice enterprise for one year taking care of marketing, accounting,
selling, and taxes as well as all other things related to running business. An essential part of the
project is a series of lectures that supports learning the basic business skills. The practice
enterprises participate also in fairs with their own stands. Yearly chosen groups of students
participate in international practice enterprise fairs as well.
Another method that familiarizes our students to entrepreneurship is do real life projects.
Working with real-life assignments provides valuable information on enterprises, their culture
and processes in addition with strict requirements and timetables.
In the second phase we continue training the students with the skills to manage and run
business, but also continue to raise the awareness and motivation. The idea is to learn
entrepreneurship in safe environment. There are several methods and alternatives for this. First
possibility for students is to establish or join existing co-operatives and run business for real with
normal entrepreneur obligations. Another option is to join the support centres on Microsoft server
products or on Cisco network equipment and work with real customer problems and charge
customers for the services.
At the moment there are two co-operatives in our faculty. The other one has been running since
2005 and the newest one is starting autumn 2010. There are two major differences compared to
the first phase of learning entrepreneurship. First, now the business is for real with real money,
real products and services, real customers and real employer's obligations like salaries to
students, insurance and value-added taxes. Second, only students that want to study
entrepreneurship this way and are ready to work for the co-operative join there. The first phase
was basically mandatory for every student in a certain degree programme. A co-operative is
actually meant for spontaneous, positive and daring students, who want to experience real
entrepreneurship as a member of a co-operative with a little bit lower risk than operating all
alone in a one-man private company.
The co-operatives have had several projects with local companies and communities. Students
get credits by working in these different projects but they also have to read suitable literature,
make presentations, reports and essays. For gaining a credit student has to show 27 hours of
work and after every five credits student has to earn other credits through reading literature and
making reports and presentations for example. Basically a student can get altogether 90 credits
by working and studying in a co-operative: so far average credits for a student has been
between 10 and 30.
Working in a co-operative develops many different core competences that entrepreneurship but
also working life today values: ability to work in team, to tolerate uncertainty, to start behaving in
an entrepreneurial way and to plan ones work. In addition to learning real business tasks like
marketing, negotiating, bookkeeping students also make close co-operation with local
companies and get good contacts with local business life. Students also network with students in
other co-operatives in other faculties.
Proceedings of the 6
th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
Another possibility to learn real entrepreneurship in safe environment is joining an Education
Support Center. The ESC Finland support center was established in May 2005 together with
Microsoft Finland and Faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business. The faculty offers
premises and tutors to the center, but all the employees are students. The idea of the center is
to provide support services to public organizations relating to any challenges with Microsoft
products installation or usage. The center has access to Microsoft solutions database and it
does cooperation with other support centers in Europe. In addition to services the center does
real projects based on customer needs. Students working in Esc Finland have the possibility and
requirement to certifigate their knowledge in certificate exams.
The third level of entrepreneurship education focuses on students the ability to identify and
exploit the business ideas they have. Now students start working with personal teacher mentors
to develop and test their business ideas and finally start their own business. To support the
initiation of business ideas we have different competitions where judges analyse the business
potential of the products introduced in the competition. A good example is the ICT Showroom
competition where student team participate with some ICT-product idea. The competition is to
encourage students to the career of an entrepreneur.
All these phases can easily be integrated into the student's personal study plan when he decides
to focus on entrepreneurship. In addition, it is possible that a student receives academic credits
for practical work on enterprise projects outside the established courses as well.
Besides these special entrepreneursship education possibilities the curricula has been designed
in manner that entrepreneurial competences are strengthened. Actually implementing CDIO has
supported these very much. Implementing design-build project in the curriculum makes student
to reflect their skills and competences. These projects are quite close to the projects in real
enterprises. They train students to work in real projects and make them understand certain
business rules. The increase use of active learning methods together with integrated learing
experiences improve students problem solving skills, communication and negotiation skills – all
important entrepreneurial competences.
DISCUSSION
Higher education institutes were recommended to integrate teaching of entrepreneruship in their
curricula. As we described earlier we have integrated many different ways to learn
entrepreneurship in our curricula. In addition, the ways to learn entrepreneurship are not very
traditional rather fresh and inspiring solutions. The paths suggested by the Ministry of Education
are partly followed. The first path that focused on intentions is strongly followed: the basic idea
of the Practise Enterprise –course is to strengthen the intentions towards entrepreneurship.
Actually we have followed this idea long before the recent proposals of the Ministry of Education.
However, paths two and three are more challenging for us. We do have some practices such as
ICT Showroom that support entrepreneurship stemming from innovations. Third path is the most
challenging for us because we do not exercise basic research rather applied research and
development. We work with existing research results and apply them to new environments and
challenges.
Our entrepreneurship education is quite well structured and it offers different alternative to the
students. Still, we think that we need to create more flexible ways to connect studying and
entrepreneurship. We have called up a team focusing on the development of our
entrepreneurship education. This team has representatives from all our degree programs and
Proceedings of the 6
th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
we try to maintain the old and create new entrepreneurship education packages that combine
students from different disciplines. Again Practise Enterprise –course is a good example. Most of
our students join this course during their first year studies as suggested by the Ministry of
Education, but engineering students join to this project in third year. The student co-operatives
answer to the inter-disciplinary requirement as well. There are students from different degree
programs, different disciplines working together for common goal just like in working life.
One of the areas that we have much to do is enhancing growth-oriented entrepreneurship. In
addition, we could take advantage from the large network of entrepreneurs and envolve them
more to planning and design of our entrepreneurship education.
The goal of all our efforts in entrepreneurship education is not that everyone starts their
enterprise. We do hope that the number startups of our students will increase. Hopefully our
efforts have given our student responsibility, understanding and some inspiration.
REFERENCES
[1] European Union. Facing the challenge - The Lisbon strategy for growth and employment.
2004 [cited; 54]. Available from:http://ec.europa.eu/growthandjobs/pdf/kok_report_en.pdf.
[2] European Commission. Green Paper - Entrepreneurship in Europe. 2003 [cited 2009
15.10.]; Available from:http://ec.europa.eu/invest-in-
research/pdf/download_en/entrepreneurship_europe.pdf.
[3] European Commission. Entrepreneurship in higher education, especially within non-
business studies - Final Report of the Expert Group. 2008 [cited 2008 26.5.]; Available
from:http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/entrepreneurship/support_measures/training_education/en
tr_highed.pdf.
[4] European Commission, Survey on Higher Education Reforms. Flash Eurobarometer
Series, 2007. #198.
[5] Potter, J., ed. Entrepreneurship and Higher Education. 2008, OECD/Local Economic and
Employment Development (LEED).
[6] Ministry of Employment and the Economy. Finland’s National Innovation Strategy. 2008
[cited 2010 2.2.]; Available from:http://ec.europa.eu/invest-in-
research/pdf/download_en/finland_national_innovation_strategy.pdf.
[7] Mitra, J. and M.J. Manimala, Higher Education’s Role in Entrepreneurship and Economic
Development, in Entrepreneurship and Higher Education. 2008, OECD. p. 45 - 64.
[8] Pihkala, J., Changes in entrepreneurship intentions during polytechnic education
(available in Finnish). Opetusministeriön julkaisuja. Vol. 1. 2008: Ministry of Education
Finland. 138.
[9] Ministry of Education Finland. Education and Research 2007-2012; Development plan.
2007 [cited 2007 6.12.]; Available from:http://www.minedu.fi/export/sites/default/OPM/Koulutus/koulutuspolitiikka/asiakirjat/kesu_
2012_fi.pdf (in Finnish).
[10] Ministry of Education, Enhancing higher education based entrepreneurship (in Finnish),
in Publications of Ministry of Education 2009:10. 2009, Ministry of Education. p. 84.
[11] Smith, A.J., L.A. Collins, and P.D. Hannon, Embedding new entrepreneurship
programmes in UK higher education institutions - Challenges and considerations.
Education + Training, 2006. 48(8/9): p. 555 - 567.
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th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
[12] Gibb, A. Towards the Entrepreneurial University - Entrepreneurship Education as a Lever
for Change. 2006 [cited 2010 12.3.]; Available from:http://www.ncge.com/uploads/Exec_Summary_-_AllanGibb.pdf.
[13] Cavaye, A.L.M., Case Study Research: a multi-faceted research approach for IS.
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[14] Yin, R.K., Applications of Case Study Research. 2002: SAGE Publications Inc.
[15] Benbasat, I., D.K. Goldstein, and M. Mead, The Case Research Strategy in Studies of
Information Systems. MIS Quarterly, 1987. 11(3): p. 369 - 386.
[16] Walsham, G., Interpreting Information Systems in Organizations. 1993, Chichester:
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[17] Broadbent, M., P. Darke, and G. Shanks, Successfully completing case study research:
combining rigour, relevance and pragmatism. Information Systems Journal, 1998. 8(4): p.
273 - 289.
[18] Wilson, K., Entrepreneurship Education in Europe, in Entrepreneurship and Higher
Education. 2008, OECD. p. 119 - 138.
[19] Solomon, G., Entrepreneurship Education in the United States, in Entrepreneurship and
Higher Education. 2008, OECD. p. 95 - 118.
[20] Potter, J., Entrepreneurship and Higher Education: Future policy Directions, in
Entrepreneurship and Higher Education. 2008, OECD. p. 313 - 336.
[21] Tekniikan akateemisten liitto TEK, Finland needs world's best engineering expertise, ed.
I. Lemmityinen. 2009, Helsinki.
[22] Elinkeinoelämän keskusliitto. Regenerative touch in engineering education (in Finnish).
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[23] Turku University of Applied Sciences. Values and strategy (in Finnish). 2010 [cited 2010
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Biographical Information
Juha Kontio is a Director of Education at the Faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business in
the Turku University of Applied Sciences. Earlier he has been a Degree Program Manager and a
Principal Lecture in the Degree Program of Business IT. In addition, he has been an
entrepreneur in information system consulting. He has actively published articles on international
education and information system conferences over internationalization, education development,
quality issues and information system implications. His doctoral dissertation focused on the
diffusion of database innovations. He is the CDIO contact person at the Turku University of
Applied Sciences.
Corresponding author
Dr. Juha Kontio
Director of Education
Faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business
Turku University of Applied Sciences
Joukahaisenkatu 3 C
20520 Turku
Finland
+358 50 3854122
[email protected]
doc_132284815.pdf
During in this such a brief elucidation about inspiring the inner entrepreneur in students a case study of entrepreneurship studies.
Proceedings of the 6
th
International CDIO Conference, École Polytechnique, Montréal, June 15-18, 2010
INSPIRING THE INNER ENTREPRENEUR IN STUDENTS – A CASE
STUDY OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP STUDIES IN TUAS
Juha Kontio
Turku University of Applied Sciences
ABSTRACT
This paper introduces a case study of the entrepreneurship studies in the Faculty of
Telecommunication and e-Business at Turku University of Applied Sciences. There are three
levels of entrepreneurship studies in our faculty: a) What is entrepreneurship? –to raise the
awareness and motivation towards entrepreneurship, b) Student co-operatives and Support
centres for training the students with the skills to manage and run business and c) Become and
entrepreneur. We describe existing recommendations for higher education to organize
entrepreneurship and also reflect our solutions to these recommendations.
KEYWORDS (4-6 )
Entrepreneurship, Case study, CDIO Standard 7, CDIO Standard 8
INTRODUCTION
Entrepreneurship is increasingly recognised as an important driver of economic growth,
productivity, innovation and employment. The importance of entrepreneurship to Europe and
Finland has been identified in many reports and studies published since 2000. The European
Union’s Lisbon Strategy stated for example that new firms and SMEs are the major sources of
growth and new jobs [1]. Furthermore, the European Commission's Green Paper
"Entrepreneurship in Europe" in 2003 stated that education should contribute to encouraging
entrepreneurship, by fostering the right mindset, awareness of career opportunities as an
entrepreneur and skills [2]. Another European Commission’s report emphasized the same issue
“Europe needs to stimulate the entrepreneurial mindsets of young people”. This report defines
entrepreneurship as something that refers to an individual’s ability to turn ideas into action.
Therefore it is a key competence for all, helping young people to be more creative and self-
confident in whatever they undertake. [3] In addition, Eurobarometer reports that almost 75
percent of interviewed teaching professionals agree that study and training programmes should
encompass more generic competences, such as communication, teamwork and
entrepreneurship. [4] The education can have different objectives such as: a) developing
entrepreneurial drive among students (raising awareness and motivation); b) training students in
the skills they need to set up a business and manage its growth; and c) developing the
entrepreneurial ability to identify and exploit opportunities. Actually, an important disctinction can
be made to entrepreneurial and entrepreneurship education and training. The entrepreneurial
education and training can apply to all forms of education, and entrepreneurship education and
training is specifically concerned with new venture creation and innovation. [5] In Finland a
challenge has been low number of small companies and low interest in starting new companies.
For example the national innovation strategy has recommended that teaching facilitating and
encouraging business and entrepreneurship must be introduced at the core of teaching. [6]
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Nowadays the role of entrepreneurship in higher education is clear. Many HEIs have recognised
that entrepreneurship courses could indeed be an effective tool for them to stimulate the
economy through their graduates [7]. In addition, students consider entrepreneurship education
an important part of their studies [8]. The policy of the Finnish Ministry of Education declares that
supporting entrepreneurship requires widening, diversifying and strenghening education in
entrepreneurship. Studies of entrepreneurship are offered as alternative studies to all students
and students’ credits earned in R&D-projects will be doubled. [9] Students in higher education
should be activated to start their own enterprises. Actually, every higher education institute
should have a policy to motivate and offer support for becoming an entrepreneur, to increase
innovations and to provide chances for business growth [10]. We don’t ask any more whether
we can teach entrepreneurship rather how we can best learn and teach it. Still, implementing
innovative entrepreneurship education programs has significant challenges and the rewards are
difficult to quantify [11]. Entrepreneurship education should focus upon developing
understanding, and capacity for pursuit, of entrepreneurial behaviours, skills and attributes in
widely different contexts. Nevertheless it demands considerable changes in pedagogy, modes of
assessment and the appropriate training of staff. [12]
This paper describes a case study of adding studies of entrepreneurship in higher education in
the faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business at the Turku University of Applied Sciences.
First, we describe the case research this paper is all about. Second, we introduce different
recommendations for higher education in entrepreneurship education. Third, we describe
entrepreneurship education in engineering. Fourth, we explain the entrepreneurship education
model in our case. Finally, we will discuss and reflect our efforts with the theorethical part of the
paper. Hopefully, we can also provide ideas to promote entrepreneurship education in
engineering programs.
THE RESEARCH
This research used qualitative methods and is a descriptive case study. The study describes
actions taken in the faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business at the Turku University of
Applied Sciences for inspiring our students to entrepreneurship. In general, a case study aims
for in depth-understanding of the context of the phenomenon [13]. Furthermore, a descriptive
case study presents a complete description of a phenomenon within its context [14]. A case
study is well-suited to capturing the knowledge of practioners and to document the experiences
of practice [15]. This paper follows interpretative tradition of the case research. It means that
there is no objective reality, which can be discovered by researchers and replicated by others
[16, 17].
Turku University of Applied Sciences is one of the biggest of its kind in Finland. Our University is
organized in six faculties that promote multidisciplinary learning. The faculty of
Telecommunication and e-Business represent four different fields of education: technology,
business, natural sciences and culture. Our main goal is to work in close co-operation with our
region and to answer to the requirements of the working life. Our education and our research
and development initiatives focus on applying knowledge rather than creating new ones.
The faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business operates in two cities and has seven different
degree programs (Table 1). We educate Masters of Engineering, Bachelors of Engineering and
Bachelors of Business Administration. The Bachelor of Engineering is a four year degree with
240 ECTS and Bachelor of Business Administration is a three and half year degree with 210
ECTS. The Master of Engineering program is a 60 credit program for students having at least
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three years of work experience after the Bachelor degree. The faculty has approximately 1500
students of which roughly 550 study in Salo campus and 950 in Turku campus.
Table 1:
Degree programs in Telecommunication and e-Business.
Degree Program Credits
ECTS
Discipline Students
Technological Competence
Management
60 Engineering 60
Information Technology
- English
- Finnish
240 Engineering 600
Electronics 240 Engineering 270
Business Information Technology 210 Information Systems 170
Business and Administration 210 Business 200
Library and Information Services 210 Information Services 70
Entrepreneurship is one of the focus areas in our mission statement: The faculty of
Telecommunication and e-Business operates interactively with the working life educating future
international experts, activating entrepreneurship and developing our region with applied
research. The main research question answered in this paper was: How do we inspire our
students for entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial attitude?
ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION RECOMMENDATIONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
Europe’s competitiveness, innovation and economic growth depend on being able to produce
future leaders with the skills and attitudes to be entrepreneurial in their professional lives,
whether by creating their own companies or innovating in larger organisations. Entrepreneurship
education is the first and arguably the most important step for embedding an innovative culture
in Europe. [18] At the same time, the European Commission’s report declares that currently the
teaching of entrepreneurship is not yet sufficiently integrated in higher education institutions'
curricula [3]. Clearly, for entrepreneurship to embrace the 21st century, educators must become
more competent in the use of academic technology, and also expand their pedagogies to
include new and innovative approaches to the teaching of entrepreneurship [19].
The Ministry of Education Finland has introduced three paths to entrepreneurship in higher
education. First path stems from the intention to become an entrepreneur: the intention requires
strong expertise if we hope it to really happen. Second path starts from an invention or from a
product-/serviceidea. When significant market potential is identified, this might strenghthen
person’s intention to entrepreneurship and lead to a start-up company. Third path is based on
research result that has entrepreneurial potention. Growth-oriented entrepreneurship can start
from this path. Figure describes how intentions, innovations and growth entrepreneurship are
linked together. [10]
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Figure 1. Entrepreneurship in higher education [10].
According to Ministry of Education Finland higher education institutions should offer a range of
courses in entrepreneurship, rather than settling on a particular model of delivery. Especially in
the early stages of promoting entrepreneurship education, it is better to have a diverse range of
provision: options that students can take! [3]
Higher education institutions could [3]:
? set up a strategy and an action plan for teaching and research in entrepreneurship,
embedding practice-based activities, and for new venture start-ups and spin-offs;
? create an entrepreneurship education department, which would serve as an
entrepreneurial hub within the institution and spread the teaching of entrepreneurship
across all other departments;
? offer an introduction to entrepreneurship and self-employment to all undergraduate
students during their first year. In addition, give all students the opportunity to attend
seminars and lectures in this subject;
? set up incentive systems to motivate and reward faculty staff in supporting students
interested in entrepreneurship, and acknowledge the academic value of research and
activities in the entrepreneurial field;
? develop clear institutional rules about intellectual property;
? award academic credits for practical work on enterprise projects outside the established
courses.
The OECD report gives four main recommendations to higher education institutes [18, 20]:
1. Scale up
? Increase the number of courses in entrepreneurship and the number of students
participating in them, particularly in lagging countries and institutions.
? Extend teaching across the HEI to address a wider range of potential entrepreneurs,
moving beyond the traditional nucleus of entrepreneurship courses in university business
schools. Offer courses to potential entrepreneurs in creative industries, science and
technology and other fields and to both postgraduates and undergraduates.
? Integrate entrepreneurship teaching with subject-specific degree content in order to draw
on the business ideas and expertise that emerge from the subject interests of students
(medicine, biology, creative industries
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? etc).
? Consider using inter-disciplinary entrepreneurship programmes to reach a wider range of
students and obtain cross-fertilisation benefits from the mixing of students from different
disciplines in the same courses and project teams, whilst retaining economies of scale.
? Expand the pool of entrepreneurship teachers. Provide training, encouragement and
support for staff embarking on entrepreneurshipteaching activities. Facilitating teaching
activities by existing and former entrepreneurs by relaxing regulations constraining their
involvement and training entrepreneurs in teaching techniques.
2. Focus on growth-oriented entrepreneurship
? Shift from traditional entrepreneurship teaching focused on business management to
courses aimed at stimulating growth-oriented entrepreneurship. Focus courses on key
growth challenges, including finance and internationalisation.
? Teach the skills that will be required for enterprise growth including opportunity
identification, risk-taking, strategy making, leadership, negotiation, networking, building
strategic alliances and intellectual property protection.
3. Introduce interactive and experiential teaching methods
? Encourage learning-by-doing in contrast to more traditional forms of academic learning.
? Increase the use of Internet and computer technologies.
? Introduce cross-functional problem-solving approaches that replicate the bundle of
activities and functions that need to be applied in entrepreneurship situations, rather than
breaking up teaching into separate business functions as in traditional management
courses.
? Involve entrepreneurs in the design and teaching of entrepreneurship courses.
? Expose students to entrepreneur role models, for example by usingentrepreneurs as
mentors, speakers and interview subjects.
? Provide students with opportunities for working in existing SMEs and adding value to
these firms through placements and consulting projects.
? Expand the use of case study teaching. Provide resources to develop cases tailored to
the environment that students will face. Provide training to support teachers to use this
approach.
4. Link into wider networks
? Tap into the resources of alumni networks to help fund and support entrepreneurship
programmes, for example by providing teachers and links to companies for placements,
mentors and so on. Monitor and build relationships with alumni to this end.
? Facilitate access to common materials and sharing of good practice by favouring
networking among institutions and teachers and providing support for the inter-institution
mobility of entrepreneurship teachers.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION
It is no surprise that majority of entrepreneurship courses are offered in business schools [18]
[3]. However, it is questionable whether Business Schools are the most appropriate place to
teach entrepreneurship: innovative and viable business ideas are more likely to arise from
technical, scientific and creative studies [3]. Entrepreneurship needs to be expanded across the
campus - especially to the technology and science departments, where many innovative ideas
and companies originate. Technical and scientific universities are potential sources of start-ups
and spin-offs. Increasingly, business and technical faculties are linking efforts to encourage the
exchange of skills and ideas among students. [18] The real challenge is to build inter-disciplinary
approaches, making entrepreneurship education accessible to all students, creating teams for
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the development and exploitation of business ideas, mixing students from economic and
business studies with students from other faculties and with different backgrounds.[3]
Most of the possible contents of entrepreneurship courses are relevant for students from all
fields of studies. However, in order for the teaching to be tailored to the specific needs of
different categories, more emphasis is placed on one aspect or another, for instance:
Entrepreneurship within science and technology studies is especially concerned with exploiting
intellectual property, creating spin-off companies and venturing, and offers courses on issues
such as [3]:
? management techniques
? marketing, commercialising and selling of technology based ideas
? patenting and protecting technology based ideas
? financing and internationalising high-tech ventures.
A large number of Finnish engineering education professionals worked for a report defining
future competences that are not in the focus of engineering education at the moment. One of the
three key challenges was to increase business competences: attitude to entrepreneurship,
business operations, marketing, selling, productization and usability.[21] Another Finnish report
challenges Universities of Applied Sciences to provide tools for new entrepreneurship. The
Universities of Applied Sciences are expected to differentiate from science universities at least in
four dimensions: learning by doing, entrepreneurship education, high quality teaching and
personal guidance. [22]
The CDIO initiative has many references to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial education.
Standards 7 (Integrated Learning Experiences) and 8 (Active Learning) both promote
entrepreneurial competences such as creative and critical thinking. The CDIO Syllabus has
section 4.2. dedicated to enterprise and business context.
ENTREPRENEURIAL AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION IN OUR FACULTY
The strategy of Turku University of Applied Sciences defines that entrepreneurship and applied
research and development will be connected to teaching. The University tries to actively inspire
the inner entrepreneur and increase number of enterprises. The entrepreneurship is
characterized as expert entrepreneurship. Furthermore the strategy defines that business
studies will be increased in all disciplines. [23] Our faculty’s model for entrepreneurship
education has three phases:
1. What is entrepreneurship?: Practice Enterprise + Real life projects
2. Learn real entrepreneurship in safe environment: Student cooperatives + Education
Support Center
3. Become an entrepreneur: Personal Mentors + Student competitions
The first phase in our model is called “What is entrepreneurship?”. As the name defines this first
phase focuses on intentions and for providing basic information about entrepreneurship. The
main method in the first phase is Practise Enterprise –module [3] where the basics of business
operations are studies in small multidisciplinary groups using problem-based learning. The
Practise Enterprise –module is 15 credits. The module has been running since 2001 and it has
yearly sharpened to the current format. Most of our students do this course as part of first year
studies, but in engineering the students are typically third-year students. The established
practice enterprises operate in a virtual practice enterprise network (see www.europen.info)
where everything else is like real life except money and goods are not moving anywhere. The
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fundamental idea is that instead of just sitting on lectures students now learn basic laws and
ways of business in a pragmatic way. At the same time they learn internal entrepreneurship,
teamwork, project work, tolerance for uncertainty and they learn to plan their work.
There is always a true enterprise behind every practice enterprise and this practice enterprise
receives all basic information like data about the cost structure from the godfather enterprise.
The students work in their practice enterprise for one year taking care of marketing, accounting,
selling, and taxes as well as all other things related to running business. An essential part of the
project is a series of lectures that supports learning the basic business skills. The practice
enterprises participate also in fairs with their own stands. Yearly chosen groups of students
participate in international practice enterprise fairs as well.
Another method that familiarizes our students to entrepreneurship is do real life projects.
Working with real-life assignments provides valuable information on enterprises, their culture
and processes in addition with strict requirements and timetables.
In the second phase we continue training the students with the skills to manage and run
business, but also continue to raise the awareness and motivation. The idea is to learn
entrepreneurship in safe environment. There are several methods and alternatives for this. First
possibility for students is to establish or join existing co-operatives and run business for real with
normal entrepreneur obligations. Another option is to join the support centres on Microsoft server
products or on Cisco network equipment and work with real customer problems and charge
customers for the services.
At the moment there are two co-operatives in our faculty. The other one has been running since
2005 and the newest one is starting autumn 2010. There are two major differences compared to
the first phase of learning entrepreneurship. First, now the business is for real with real money,
real products and services, real customers and real employer's obligations like salaries to
students, insurance and value-added taxes. Second, only students that want to study
entrepreneurship this way and are ready to work for the co-operative join there. The first phase
was basically mandatory for every student in a certain degree programme. A co-operative is
actually meant for spontaneous, positive and daring students, who want to experience real
entrepreneurship as a member of a co-operative with a little bit lower risk than operating all
alone in a one-man private company.
The co-operatives have had several projects with local companies and communities. Students
get credits by working in these different projects but they also have to read suitable literature,
make presentations, reports and essays. For gaining a credit student has to show 27 hours of
work and after every five credits student has to earn other credits through reading literature and
making reports and presentations for example. Basically a student can get altogether 90 credits
by working and studying in a co-operative: so far average credits for a student has been
between 10 and 30.
Working in a co-operative develops many different core competences that entrepreneurship but
also working life today values: ability to work in team, to tolerate uncertainty, to start behaving in
an entrepreneurial way and to plan ones work. In addition to learning real business tasks like
marketing, negotiating, bookkeeping students also make close co-operation with local
companies and get good contacts with local business life. Students also network with students in
other co-operatives in other faculties.
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Another possibility to learn real entrepreneurship in safe environment is joining an Education
Support Center. The ESC Finland support center was established in May 2005 together with
Microsoft Finland and Faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business. The faculty offers
premises and tutors to the center, but all the employees are students. The idea of the center is
to provide support services to public organizations relating to any challenges with Microsoft
products installation or usage. The center has access to Microsoft solutions database and it
does cooperation with other support centers in Europe. In addition to services the center does
real projects based on customer needs. Students working in Esc Finland have the possibility and
requirement to certifigate their knowledge in certificate exams.
The third level of entrepreneurship education focuses on students the ability to identify and
exploit the business ideas they have. Now students start working with personal teacher mentors
to develop and test their business ideas and finally start their own business. To support the
initiation of business ideas we have different competitions where judges analyse the business
potential of the products introduced in the competition. A good example is the ICT Showroom
competition where student team participate with some ICT-product idea. The competition is to
encourage students to the career of an entrepreneur.
All these phases can easily be integrated into the student's personal study plan when he decides
to focus on entrepreneurship. In addition, it is possible that a student receives academic credits
for practical work on enterprise projects outside the established courses as well.
Besides these special entrepreneursship education possibilities the curricula has been designed
in manner that entrepreneurial competences are strengthened. Actually implementing CDIO has
supported these very much. Implementing design-build project in the curriculum makes student
to reflect their skills and competences. These projects are quite close to the projects in real
enterprises. They train students to work in real projects and make them understand certain
business rules. The increase use of active learning methods together with integrated learing
experiences improve students problem solving skills, communication and negotiation skills – all
important entrepreneurial competences.
DISCUSSION
Higher education institutes were recommended to integrate teaching of entrepreneruship in their
curricula. As we described earlier we have integrated many different ways to learn
entrepreneurship in our curricula. In addition, the ways to learn entrepreneurship are not very
traditional rather fresh and inspiring solutions. The paths suggested by the Ministry of Education
are partly followed. The first path that focused on intentions is strongly followed: the basic idea
of the Practise Enterprise –course is to strengthen the intentions towards entrepreneurship.
Actually we have followed this idea long before the recent proposals of the Ministry of Education.
However, paths two and three are more challenging for us. We do have some practices such as
ICT Showroom that support entrepreneurship stemming from innovations. Third path is the most
challenging for us because we do not exercise basic research rather applied research and
development. We work with existing research results and apply them to new environments and
challenges.
Our entrepreneurship education is quite well structured and it offers different alternative to the
students. Still, we think that we need to create more flexible ways to connect studying and
entrepreneurship. We have called up a team focusing on the development of our
entrepreneurship education. This team has representatives from all our degree programs and
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we try to maintain the old and create new entrepreneurship education packages that combine
students from different disciplines. Again Practise Enterprise –course is a good example. Most of
our students join this course during their first year studies as suggested by the Ministry of
Education, but engineering students join to this project in third year. The student co-operatives
answer to the inter-disciplinary requirement as well. There are students from different degree
programs, different disciplines working together for common goal just like in working life.
One of the areas that we have much to do is enhancing growth-oriented entrepreneurship. In
addition, we could take advantage from the large network of entrepreneurs and envolve them
more to planning and design of our entrepreneurship education.
The goal of all our efforts in entrepreneurship education is not that everyone starts their
enterprise. We do hope that the number startups of our students will increase. Hopefully our
efforts have given our student responsibility, understanding and some inspiration.
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Biographical Information
Juha Kontio is a Director of Education at the Faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business in
the Turku University of Applied Sciences. Earlier he has been a Degree Program Manager and a
Principal Lecture in the Degree Program of Business IT. In addition, he has been an
entrepreneur in information system consulting. He has actively published articles on international
education and information system conferences over internationalization, education development,
quality issues and information system implications. His doctoral dissertation focused on the
diffusion of database innovations. He is the CDIO contact person at the Turku University of
Applied Sciences.
Corresponding author
Dr. Juha Kontio
Director of Education
Faculty of Telecommunication and e-Business
Turku University of Applied Sciences
Joukahaisenkatu 3 C
20520 Turku
Finland
+358 50 3854122
[email protected]
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