Advancing Excellence in Evidence-Based Entrepreneurship Education

Overview

How people understand entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurship can contribute to positive change is evolving as is the role educators are expected to play.

An entrepreneurial and innovative mindset can produce fruitful results in areas such as creative industries (for instance, media and music) and it is also being embedded in efforts to adapt to environmental challenges and reimagine specific sectors such as marine industries. This course covers some of these industries, new opportunities, markets, and how entrepreneurship can be adapted to sector specific needs.

A notable part of this evolution is that the stereotype of an entrepreneur is expanding from the hero type to include others. Women, seniors or the young are for example increasingly entrepreneurial in their actions and their identity. This course highlights these increasingly common entrepreneurs.

Finally, this course addresses the core challenge of entrepreneurship – the uncertainty and risk associated with entrepreneurial ventures. In this course, we highlight methods recently proven to increase entrepreneurial success rates which focus on critical thinking, coherence and clarity about ventures.

This course is designed for educators in higher education who want to advance their teaching and/or research in entrepreneurship. It may be of interest to those teaching across all discipline areas given the wide breath of topics covered. It will give them opportunities to reflect on how entrepreneurship practices in the different topics can be introduced and assessed in an educational context.

Designed to give maximum choice to learners, the open course will offer six units delivered by experts in the areas. The overall objective of this course is to advance excellence in entrepreneurship education and further develop a network of educators across Ireland. The six units are:

• Inclusive Entrepreneurial Ecosystems.
• Increasing Success Rates with Improved Decision-Making Tools.
• Opportunities in the Silver Economy.
• Entrepreneurship in the Marine sector.
• Entrepreneurship for Creative Industries.
• Youth Entrepreneurship.

Learning outcomes:

• Reflect on how entrepreneurship practices in different topics can be introduced in an educational context and how they can be best assessed.
• Build knowledge of other non-traditional types of entrepreneurs (women, young, seniors), diverse industries/sectors (arts, environmental sciences…) and methods of validating entrepreneurship.
• Critically assess how the research on the different entrepreneurship forms can enrich entrepreneurship educational practices.