Entrepreneurship in the Curriculum
1. Ent repreneur ship in General Education
All or nearly all American colleges and universities share a basic interest in general education. This is the realm of learning that aims to equip American college students with both a set of skills quantitative, verbal, analytical, etc. that is essential to all fields but particular to none and a breadth of intellectual experience that can help them integrate knowledge from different fields. By definition, general education articulates the core educational mission of a college or university. As such, it is the province of no discrete school or department. It represents institutionwide, trans-disciplinary learning. Increasingly, general education requirements focus on helping students gain basic competence in writing, quantitative analysis, interdisciplinary, research, globalization, ethics, and citizenship.
General education is where students are expected to acquire the fundamentals of learning that they can then apply to more specialized areas of study and to the rest of their lives. Entrepreneurship is ideal for general education because it is a practice that applies to many fields and because it provides a revealing lens for studying how cultural values, social institutions, economic policies, and legal practices interrelate to shape human behavior. Entrepreneur ship naturall y and authentically draws together subjects usually taught and studied separately. For example, an introductory, foundational course in entrepreneurship designed for all students can explore and explain how core cultural values come to expression in a broad range of human activities from economics to law to politics to culture to religion and how these realms must collaborate to make entrepreneurship routine in American society. To take one instance, contemporary American entrepreneurship depends on the legal concept of intellectual property, the notion that ideas can be owned and their use restricted to and by the owner.
Beneath this legal concept are logically prior notions of the self, the autonomy of the individual, and that our ideas come from within us and therefore belong to us. This range of values and practices is the context for our practice of entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurial lens illustrates concretely how big theoretical, philosophical, and sometimes theological constructs become real, practical, and affect everyday life in short, how values matter. In doing so, a foundational course in entrepreneurship can admirably fulfill the ideals of broad, interconnected, and relevant learning that mark a quality general education. It also brings entrepreneurship into the mainstream of students’ discourse about their own education and helps them apply it when they turn to more specialized study. For general education , entrepreneurship has yet another pertinence. In the United States, entrepreneurship is a primary way in which our free society grows and improves not only our economy, but our cultural and social lives as well. Entrepreneurship is a fundamental means by which a free society comes to know itself.
Through the continual innovation, the ongoing transformation of ideas and enterprises, and the persistent testing which takes place in the market, American society learns about itself and its culture in the very process of developing that culture. Nothing else we do even, and particularly, holding elections gives us such comprehensive collective selfknowledge. By showing students how American politics, law, culture, and economics actually interact and must interact to produce tangible results, the broad study of entrepreneurship in general education can be a fresh and stimulating way for students to achieve a realistically comprehensive picture of the concrete machinery of their own economy and society. The study of entrepreneurship thereby helps ready students for informed citizenship.
2. Entrepreneurship and the Disciplines
American baccalaureate education is built around academic disciplines. Whatever else they may do in college, all students pursue a major or concentration in a particular subject or subjects. Recent scholarship makes clear that disciplinary learning at least as much as, and possibly more than, general education is central to students’ experience. …the academic disciplines shape students’ educational experience in every way. What students learn about diversity, critical thinking, writing, quantitative reasoning, information literacy, and technology including how these terms are defined is mediated by the disciplines, as are the best pedagogical strategies to teach students these skills.
This mediation is not only true for students’ third and fourth years in college…but for the first two years as well….[T]here is no such thing as an undergraduate education; instead we have many undergraduate educations filtered through the lenses of particular disciplines….3 If this account is even reasonably accurate and there are reasons to think it is more than that entrepreneurship must find its place among and within the disciplines to become genuinely mainstream. Entrepreneurship’s natural and broad applicability enables such curricular integration at the level of both the discrete course and the disciplinary program, the major or concentration. The erelevance of entrepreneurship to studies in business and economics goes without saying.
But courses in history or literature could focus on entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial themes. The study of the impact of government policies on entrepreneurship easily fits within political science or economics. Entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly relevant in nursing and the delivery of health care. The broad area of environmental studies and sustainability is rich with entrepreneurial possibility. Religion and political science offer interesting options to explore the power of entrepreneurial activity outside the realm of business.4
3 Catherine Hoffman Beyer, Gerald M. Gilmore, and Andrew T. Fisher, Inside the Undergraduate Experience: The University of Washington’s Study of Undergraduate Learning (Bolton, Mass., Anker Publishing Company, 2007), p. 23 4 Political movements and evangelical religions, both of which outlive their founders, may be inherently entrepreneurial, though their markets, in the first instance, are not economic. In some forms of contemporary Protestantism, the connection between religion and entrepreneurship is explicit. See, for instance, www.pastorpreneur.com
4 Political movements and evangelical religions, both of which outlive their founders, may be inherently entrepreneurial, though their markets, in the first instance, are not economic. In some forms of contemporary Protestantism, the connection between religion and entrepreneurship is explicit. See, for instance, www.pastorpreneur.com.
A very promising area that may well become fundamental to entrepreneurship education builds on research in psychology and sociology. This area of learning analyzes and teaches the traits that correlate with entrepreneurial achievement, such as creativity, innovation, and self-efficacy. Integrating entrepreneurship int o di screte courses howe v e r valuable addresses only part of students’ experience with the disciplines. The major, the collection of courses that constitutes an extended and integrated program of learning, shapes what students know about their most important subject and how they know it.
The major brings them into a community of inquiry and, teaches them an intellectual discourse, the discipline’s language of knowledge. The courses in the major reinforce habits of mind, analytical practices, and approaches to problemsolving. Entrepreneurship will have its most durable impact on higher education if it not only finds an appropriate place in the disciplinary subjects, but shapes the major itself.
For example, to enhance students’ sense of entrepreneurial possibility, some educators suggest that courses in commercialization should be available to, if not required of, students who major in any of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subjects.
The issue goes deeper than this. Since the major is likely the most influential component of students’ learning, it is the logical context in which they can explore and experience what we might call the entrepreneurial move from intelligibility to innovation.
An entrepreneurial approach to the major might stress both the mastery of basic information and insight into the new ideas that have altered a field of learning over time. While the major conventionally gives students extensive exposure to a subject, its structure often does not address systemic innovation in a field. Thus, students cannot always see how change and progress have affected their own
learning and thinking.
An articulated emphasis in the major on how a field has improved analysis , advanced understanding, and implemented change could help students learn to innovate about what they know and thereby make innovation itself more a part of their educational experience and discourse. Again, the analogy to music may be helpful. Departments of music composition cannot make students creative.
But studying how great music is made can ignite whatever creativity students possess and help bring it to expression. The aim of studying composition is to unpack works of genius and excellence and thereby lead students beyond imitation to originality.
5 Students are more likely to practice innovation if their education values it, and it is a basic part of their learning. So it is with entrepreneurship. Making innovation intelligible may help students to imagine and engage in entrepreneurial activities they otherwise might not have considered.
Thein teration of entrepreneurship into the major is more than a departmental matter. Academic guilds and accrediting agencies determine the form and contents of majors in many fields, particularly those outside of arts and sciences and traditionally dee medas preprofessional, i.e., business, education, communication, engineering, architecture, etc.
Any movement to make majors more entrepreneurial will ask the guilds and accrediting agencies to rethink the so-called learning outcomes of their subjects and to establish new standards and directions of educational consequence for them. This is particularly pertinent to undergraduate business programs, which traditionally attract the nation’s largest numbers of majors, and where entrepreneurship is assumed to have its most natural educational home.
Altering certified majors can be a slow process, and we encourage universities, learned societies, and accrediting agencies not to delay in initiating serious discussions about entrepreneurial change
5 This formulation derives from Shelton Berg, dean of the Frost School of Music, University of Miami. The arguments for entrepreneurship in the undergraduate major apply with even greater force to graduate and professional studies.
As graduate students craft their own independent research projects and thereby fulfill the American educational ideal of a career in the work of discovery and creativity , exposureto entrepreneurship may trigger an awareness of how their new ideas can have broad impact. In principle, graduate education need not be inimical to the creation of new enterprises. Indeed, in some graduate programs, new products are the natural outcomes of research.
The educational practices of such programs could be adapted and applied to other fields and institutions. This is not to suggest that graduate work must be applied research, but rather that an entrepreneurial climate can offer an enriched perspective on the consequences of pure research.
1. Entrepreneurship in the CoCurriculum By its very nature ,
entrepreneurship in college cannot be limited to the classroom. Students interested in it and committed to it will want the opportunity to try it out to actually do it. For students drawn to business or engaged in addressing persisting social problems , entrepreneur ship’ s emphas i s on implementing new enterprises provides a constructive and practical outlet for their natural idealism and its associated enthusiasm. It can help them see how to solve problems and get things done.
In this regard, the environment outside the classroom is critical. Again, a comparison to music is illustrative. Because it depends on an audience, music, unlike most other academic subjects, thrives outside as well as inside the classroom. Most American colleges and universities regard musical performance as a natural part of campus life.
They routinely sponsor multiple co-curricular, non-credit musical groups from a capella ensembles, to glee clubs, to orchestras, to jazz and rock bands.
With a supportive campus env ironment, Ame ri can undergraduates can increase their musical skills and fulfill their interests in music whether or not they study and perform it for credit. So it should before entrepreneurship. Students interested in starting their own businesses or other enterprises benefit from a campus environment that takes entrepreneurship seriously and supports it.
Some universities have opened dedicated offices and workspaces that allow student entrepreneurs to find both the resources of information and fellowship that help to foster their work.
Other schools have established special residence halls for entrepreneurs or created programs of student-initiated and student-owned businesses. Many university career centers provide regular opportunities for students to meet and learn from local and alumni entrepreneurs.
The Enterprisers program, offered by Cambridge University, is a useful example of a short, focused cocurricular program with consequential results, particularly in concert with internships and other practical experiences.6 These activities easily can be applied to students’ efforts in the nonprofit sector as well. All university efforts along these lines help student entrepreneurs find substantive advice and meaningful encouragement to persist with their projects. The universities also benefit.
Student entrepreneurs bring a distinctive vitality and energy to campus life. They help make a college campus fun and exciting. Entrepreneurship is among a handful of careers most of which are not represented in the curriculum that students can pursue while they are in college.
Student entrepreneurs integrate learning with the off-campus world of work, problem-solving, and achievement. They add a rich and leavening dimension to a campus culture. 6 www.enterprisers.org.uk Entrepreneurship and the Management of Universities Students learn best when they can live what they learn.
By being more entrepreneurial in their academic and administrative practices, universities can help students become independent and innovative risk-takers.
The more comprehensively students encounter entrepreneurial concepts and behaviors in their college experience, the more likely they are to assimilate them.
The proliferation of offices of technology transfer suggests that universities increasingly recognize the economic benefit of entrepreneurship.
But most students and faculty encounter technology transfer only indirectly.
The more basic issue is how entrepreneurial values can become broadly integral to a university’s culture. Entrepreneurship is about devising and implementing new ideas and practices or improving old ones.
In a progressively technological, scientific, and interconnected world, the quality of innovation in large measure increasingly relies on superior advanced learning A strong educational foundation helps ensure that new ideas will be effective and substantive. Because entrepreneurship promotes, implements, and rewards innovation, it necessarily correlates with education.
In this light, a key task of American higher education surely is to continue to stress and reward innovation and its implementation as a core educational goal.
Curriculumis the basic enterprise of education. In American universities, our administrative processes for curricular innovation, at the levels of both the course and the program, run the gamut from open to restricted. Continuous curricular innovation is hardly a uniform practice.
An educational culture of what we might call curricular entrepreneurship would create budgetary practices and incentive structures to reward faculty and departments for curricular innovations, fresh interdisciplinary partnerships, experiments with new modes of instruction, etc.
A more explicit educational focus on innovation and its implementation to be sure, in ways that respect the integrity of the varied academic disciplines would help encourage university faculty and academic departments continually to adopt, apply, and assess methods of teaching and learning that foster creativity and originality.7 The same considerations should apply to the areas of research and tenure.
One obvious consequence of universities’ new emphasis on technology transfer is a fresh perspective on and appreciation of translational research. In our view, universities should treat translational research as basic research, and the measure of impact of research should be part of the review for tenure and promotion.
An academic culture animated by entrepreneurial values not only enhances innovation in research, it also creates a comprehensive educational climate for students. Good teachers are more than sources of information for students. They can be important role models as well. Entrepreneurial students will learn most from entrepreneurial teachers.
Conclusion There are compelling reasons to make entrepreneurship a mainstream subject and an animating force in American higher education. As the world’s natural resources ebb and technology advances, humanity increasingly will live by its wits. Human understanding, ingenuity, and inventiveness will become ever more critical to creating a sustainable future. But innovation alone will not suffice.
We will need people who know how to implement new ideas and make them accessible to large populations. 7 For example, see the work of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University : www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/project s/labs.html An entrepreneurial society will not emerge or persist by accident. We will have to build it and maintain it.
To do both, we will have to understand why entrepreneurship matters, how it works, and how to sustain it. That understanding is the result of education. Advanced education is one of our nation’s greatest cultural resources. Students from all over the world come here to learn in the unique research-based and research-driven educational framework of American universities an environment defined by free inquiry, autonomous thinking, intellectual passion, and originality.
In american education , intelligibility is a basic goal, and innovation and discovery are the most consequential results. Entrepreneurship is higher education’s authentic and natural ally. An entrepreneurial education is an enabling education. The union of the two is our best hope to bring humanity the greatest benefit from the finest outcomes of independent and creative learning.
Profiles of Innovative Entrepreneurship Education Programs During the past two decades, tremendous growth has occurred in the number of entrepreneurship courses offered by colleges and universities.
In 1985, studies indicate there were about 250 entrepreneurship courses offered across all college campuses in the United States. Today, more than 5,000 entrepreneurship courses are now offered in two-year and four-year institutions.
The profiles on the following pages offer a few examples of innovative courses and programs in entrepreneurship that colleges and universities now offer to introduce and engage students into the process, opportunities, and excitement generated through entrepreneurship. While these are by no means the only exciting things happening in universities across America, these profiles do illustrate concretely how the suggestions in this report can and have been implemented.
Kauffman CampusesSM An Overview The Kauffman Foundation has spent much of the last fifteen years helping accelerate the development of entrepreneurship programs at colleges and universities, most recently operating on the belief that teaching students about running an enterprise and thinking innovatively should not be solely the province of business schools.
In 2003, the Kauffman Foundation announced its commitment to the idea of cross-campus entrepreneurship programs by launching the Kauffman CampusesSM Initiative, awarding a total of $25 million to eight American institutions of higher education. The recipients were selected after a highprofile competition among twenty-six colleges and universities.
Building on the success of those grants, the Kauffman Foundation awarded at total of $23 million in Kauffman CampusesSM grants to eleven more schools in late 2006.
Kauffman Campuses II, as the program has been dubbed, not only builds on the best aspects of Kauffman Campuses I, it significantly leverages the Foundation’s investment through partnerships with other funding sources.
By involving others in the program, the Kauffman Foundation hopes to leverage its commitment and get foundations and other entities thinking entrepreneurially as well. The goal, as it always has been, is to create a cultural transformation on college campuses that results in graduates who are dynamic thinkers and risk-takers no matter what major areas of study the students pursue.
Inaugural Kauffman Campuses
Florida International University
– University of Rochester
– Howard University
– University of Texas at El Paso
– University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
– Wake Forest University
– University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Washington
– University in St. Louis
Kauffman Campuses Second Round
Arizona State University
– Syracuse University
– Georgetown University
– University of Maryland, Baltimore County Purdue University
– University of Wisconsin Madison Northeast Ohio College Entrepreneurship Program in partnership with the Burton D. Morgan Foundation:
– Baldwin-Wallace College
– Oberlin College Hiram College
– The College of Wooster
