Five attributes that innovation and entrepreneurship programs should cultivate
What are the essential elements for building inclusive entrepreneurship education in the STEM and innovation space? The nonprofit VentureWell recently undertook a project to assess the impact of STEM entrepreneurship education programs in higher education, and to identify the traits that these programs should teach in order to build and support the next generation of diverse entrepreneurs.
Through the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) workshop series, funded by the National Science Foundation, VentureWell brought together social scientists and entrepreneurship educators to bridge the gap between their areas of expertise.
These dynamic workshops resulted in white papers that provide research-based insights into these key ingredients for teaching inclusive entrepreneurship, including teamwork, motivation, critical thinking, problem solving, and empathy.
We recently spoke to VentureWell’s Associate Vice President for Data Intelligence Chithra Adams, who developed the VentureWell IUSE workshop series, to learn how entrepreneurship programs are measuring their impact, improving their teaching, and making their curricula more inclusive.
What was the ultimate goal around this project?
Big picture: one of VentureWell’s goals as an organization is to make innovation and entrepreneurship more inclusive. One piece of the puzzle is making entrepreneurship courses and programs in colleges and universities more inclusive, and we can encourage this by looking at how entrepreneurship is taught.
The hard business skills required for starting a business are necessary, for sure, but many students — from any background — need to be taught the soft skills as well, like how to communicate effectively as a team or how to use empathy to understand customer needs.
We don’t have to be vague about what these skills are or how to teach them, either. We can turn to social scientists, who rigorously study these subjects. We wanted to bring in the social science perspective on these key attributes of successful entrepreneurs, what they are and how to effectively teach them while also teaching entrepreneurship. What we found was that the two go together incredibly well.
To quote from one of the white papers, “Critical thinking is not only closely intertwined with entrepreneurship, but it is also a meta-skill to master other entrepreneurship skills/abilities.” In addition to providing a comprehensive review of the literature on the subject, the white paper authors also included classroom exercises that instructors can use, such as guided analyses of case studies and active, hands-on entrepreneurship projects.
We want entrepreneurship instructors to use and benefit from these papers. We believe incorporating social science findings into entrepreneurship education will make that education both more effective and more inclusive.
What was the process VentureWell used?
Improving Undergraduate STEM Education was a workshop series project. We used a Delphi study to ask people who run invention and entrepreneurship programs what are the key five attributes that they think are essential for invention and entrepreneurship and that they teach in their programs. We identified consensus around the top-ranked attributes of empathy, critical thinking, creativity in the lens of problem-solving, motivation, and teamwork and collaboration.
Once we identified those five, we brought in social scientists to study the construct and paired them up with an entrepreneur educator or researcher.
Let’s talk about each of those five attributes. What were the findings around teamwork and collaboration?
Internal team communication — specifically, communication that is positive and solution-oriented — is important. Team members need to feel psychologically safe in order to openly share their ideas, and this open communication facilitates innovation implementation.
While relationship conflict is damaging for team work, task conflict and cognitive conflict often have a positive impact during the conceptualization phase. During later project implementation phases, these can, however, become disruptive.
How do you spark motivation in students, particularly for those who don’t see themselves as entrepreneurs?
Motivation and behavior influence each other. For example, students’ interpretations of past behavior can impact their future motivation. The authors of this paper suggest that, “in order to understand and promote students’ motivation to engage in a behavior, it may be necessary to solicit and potentially reframe students’ interpretation of past behavior.”
Motivation is also linked to students’ well-being and persistence in challenging environments. Supporting students’ personal interests and satisfaction is more effective than focusing solely on competitive, performance-oriented activities. Student motivation is also shaped by social and cultural contexts. Students’ perceptions of support from mentors and their sense of belonging in a community are crucial for fostering motivation, especially in entrepreneurship education.
How do you incorporate critical thinking into entrepreneurship education?
Higher questioning techniques, such as asking students to clarify their ideas, probe their own reasoning, and consider different viewpoints as they work through a complex project, refines their critical thinking. Entrepreneurship is highly complex, so it makes an excellent subject for practicing critical thinking.
Students can be encouraged to reflect on their thoughts and reactions, while at the same time also engaging them in argumentation to train them in constructing logical, evidence-based arguments. Both methods, reflection and argumentation, can be applied in group discussions, debates, and role-playing. Problem- and project-based learning, case studies, and virtual simulations are active learning pedagogies that foster critical thinking as well.
Critical thinking can also be fostered through mentorship — through dialog, mentors help students explore and ideate solutions, while offering feedback that helps students ground their ideas in reality.
How do you foster creativity and problem solving?
Divergent thinking is a key element of creativity and problem solving, and crucial for innovation. Flex-based learning or flex experiments — like establishing connections between two very different topics or transferring structure from a familiar domain to an unfamiliar one — encourages this kind of thinking.
Students can also be taught how to evaluate their own ideas through self-evaluation exercises, and self-awareness is encouraged by drawing attention to their thought processes. A supportive environment is crucial to these exercises. Within this environment, students can practice their creative skills, and instructors can provide feedback that highlights their progress.
What is the role of empathy in teaching entrepreneurship?
To quote this white paper: “Central to entrepreneurship is the ability to recognize opportunities and create value, often rooted in empathetic understanding.”
The three components of empathy — experience-sharing, compassion, and perspective-taking — all play a critical role in customer discovery, helping entrepreneurs understand pain points and needs. Empathy also plays an important role in human-centered design and in building products and designing services around customer needs.
Role playing and service learning projects are both ways to encourage students to develop their empathy in relation to entrepreneurship, as is bringing in mentors and guest speakers from a variety of backgrounds.
What were your other takeaways from the project?
There is power in interdisciplinary work. Through this process, I have a deeper understanding of the theories and frameworks behind the attributes as well as a deeper appreciation of how the practice of innovation and entrepreneurship provides a fertile bed to practice these skills to come up with solutions that benefit us all.
