The Barriers to Embedding Entrepreneurship Education in Universities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56433/kaafvt31Keywords:
Design Thinking, skills, pedagogy, entrepreneurship, interdisciplinarityAbstract
Embedding ‘entrepreneurship’ into universities, whether in curricula or as standalone activities through the likes of accelerator programmes has become a key university strategy, enhanced by Tuffee and Little’s 2023 paper, The Entrepreneurial Campus. There is no doubt a transformative ideology, placing the entrepreneurial mindset and skills development of graduates from degree programmes at the heart of the recommendations, is necessary. Coupled with this, their paper suggests interdisciplinary teaching methods as one of the core solutions to this, with experiential teaching as key to unlocking social entrepreneurship, for example. There are many examples of experiential education methods, which develop entrepreneurial mindsets, such as ‘Design Thinking’ (Bremner & Air, 2023) and Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) (Guth & Rubin, 2015) but at times there is a gap between university and the ‘real world’ which is hard to bridge. With the present position of the university sector, not just within Scotland but the UK as a whole, the ability to ‘make these things happen’ is becoming harder and yet necessary for the Government to maintain and contribute to the economic growth and regeneration of the country. This opinion piece will consider the gap between these entrepreneurial development pedagogic methods and industry.
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