Crowdfunding and Museums: A Field Trip Exemplar in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This article sketches a project designed for an undergraduate course dealing with social contexts of entrepreneurship. The learning activity asks students to devise a reward-based crowdfunding campaign for a museum. The project relies on a field trip to a museum where students gather a better understanding of fiscal and brand visibility challenges currently unsettling these types of organizations. The project draws on intra and extra classroom activities that integrate innovative trends in entrepreneurship teaching, bridging theory, and real-life applications. The exercise motivates students to design solutions, develop collaborations, and cocreate value processes with the organization and diverse actors. The activities span over a 4-week period with tasks prior, during, and after the museum field trip, culminating with a presentation of a crowdfunding campaign. The pedagogical value of this exercise relates to students cocreating entrepreneurial action with a client/entrepreneurial organization within a resource-constrained environment, which motivates the design of innovative crowdfunding campaigns and empathizes with the entrepreneurial demands placed on cultural organizations. Cultural, social, and creative problem-solving competencies for working in international and multidisciplinary teams around crowdfunding can be expected as outcomes. This exercise can be advantageous for courses dealing with the multifaceted dynamics of social contexts of entrepreneurship.

Exploring Entrepreneurship Education Effectiveness at British Universities – An Application of the World Café Method

“…Universities engage in teaching interventions that aim to stimulate entrepreneurial attitudes and behavior among students (Ilonen & Heinonen, 2018;Packham et al, 2010). Educators apply various methods, such as case-based teaching (Finney & Pyke, 2008), simulations and games (Fox et al, 2018), prototyping (Noyes, 2018), unfamiliar contexts to probe concepts (Decker-Lange, 2018;Junqueira & Cruz, 2019), competitions (Brentnall et al, 2018;Chandler & Broberg, 2019), action learning (Mukesh et al, 2019), and digital learning (Sousa et al, 2019). The aim is not only to learn about entrepreneurship but also to learn for entrepreneurship in terms of entrepreneurial skills and competency development.…”

The Effects of Hackathons on the Entrepreneurial Skillset and Perceived Self-Efficacy as Factors Shaping Entrepreneurial Intentions

“…Universities create a range of teaching interventions that aim to stimulate entrepreneurial behavior and competency building among students (Ilonen and Heinonen 2018;Packham et al 2010;Wenninger 2019). Educators apply methods including: Case-based teaching (Finney and Pyke 2008), simulations and games (Fox et al 2018), prototyping (Noyes 2018), using unfamiliar contexts to probe concept understanding and acquisition (Decker-Lange 2018; Junqueira et al 2019), entrepreneurial competitions (Brentnall et al 2018;Chandler and Broberg 2019), cross-institutional distance learning (Apostolopoulos et al 2018) and critical reflection (Wraae et al 2020;Pepin 2012). Similarly to hackathons, some of these interventions, like for example simulations or prototyping, can be classified as based on the PBL methodology.…”