Case-based entrepreneurship education in and for the Nordic region

Abstract

Entrepreneurship refers to a process of exploring and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities to create and capture economic, environmental, and social values (Baron & Shane, 2007). Entrepreneurship is an important means of creating our future (Pacheco, Dean, & Payne, 2010). Educating students to have the necessary entrepreneurial skills and mindset to act entrepreneurially (referred to as entrepreneurship education) is therefore high on the agenda of many higher education institutions. Examples of entrepreneurial skills that entrepreneurship education aims to increase are identifying new opportunities in the presently unknowable, creating value in uncertain situations, and making decisions based on few concrete details (Nabi et al., 2017).The aim of increasing students' entrepreneurial skills and mindset distinguishes entrepreneurship education from other-more functional-disciplines at higher education institutions, such as business and management education (Nabi et al., 2017). Entrepreneurship educators often draw on experiential learning process and make use of game-and design-based learning approaches to teach students these distinct entrepreneurial skills (Neck & Greene, 2011). Case teaching is a popular pedagogical approach to teaching entrepreneurship (Neck & Greene, 2011) because using cases enhances students' active participation, reflection, and discussion, which are critical elements of an experiential learning process to increase students' entrepreneurial skills and mindset. Despite these differences between teaching entrepreneurship and more functional disciplines, such as management and business, many entrepreneurship educators currently borrow case teaching methods and accompanying cases from business and management education to teach students the art of entrepreneurship (Neck & Greene, 2011). Scholars argue that too much functionality lessens the entrepreneurial spirit of the students and in the classroom