Entrepreneurship Education in a Multidisciplinary Environment: Evidence from an Entrepreneurship Programme Held in Turin

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education can increase student’s entrepreneurial skills and intention; and entrepreneurship activities stimulate economic growth. Therefore, the number of entrepreneurship courses is increasing, but they are often offered to students from a specific field of study and/or to only one educational level, even though multidisciplinarity is important for entrepreneurship. This study has carried out an exploratory single case study on an entrepreneurial programme in a multidisciplinary environment, that is, the Contamination Lab of Turin (CLabTo). Moreover, pre- and post-surveys have also been conducted in order to perform some qualitative analyses. The results show the importance of creating teams with different competencies, cognitive and decision-making skills. Moreover, we explain how design-thinking is useful in entrepreneurship education and that a challenge-based entrepreneurship course leads to cooperation with external actors in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. It is also explained what the obstacles and opportunities of these programmes are and how to improve them. Moreover, on the basis of pre- and post-surveys, our qualitative analyses show that the students’ overall perception of their abilities to work in a multidisciplinary team, their entrepreneurial skills and entrepreneurial intentions increased slightly. In short, this work is aimed at increasing the importance of entrepreneurship education in a multidisciplinary environment and the use of practical-oriented teaching models.

Entrepreneurial intention: An analysis of the role of Student-Led Entrepreneurial Organizations

“…The European Commission has recently recognized entrepreneurship as one of the key competences that all individuals need (EU 2006). In 2016, the European Commission also developed the "Entrepreneurship Competence framework" (EntreComp) with the aim to raise consensus among all stakeholders and to establish a bridge between the worlds of education and work (Bacigalupo et al 2016;Fiore et al 2019). Therefore, policy makers are fostering the development of an entrepreneurial culture (Lewis and Llewellyn 2004;O'Connor 2013) in order to increase entrepreneurial activities (Lado and Vozikis 1996;Cavallo et al 2020).…”

Entrepreneurship Education Challenges for Green Transformation

“…Unfortunately, the development of the range of competencies relevant to Green Transformation, above and beyond University-level research studies, and especially in the development of a citizen, or the collective citizenry, have hardly been an area of study. Fiore et al (2019) have attempted to study collaboration between multidisciplinary student teams by measuring competencies before and after an entrepreneurship course. Their findings indicate a slightly positive change in participants' assessments.…”

Assessing the Development of Entrepreneurial Competencies

“…Despite the difference, found in this group of students, it does not invalidate the fact that the participation of students from different areas is equally relevant. As Fiore et al [12] emphasize, entrepreneurial education must reach the educational contexts through learner-centered, multidisciplinary pedagogical models, based on experiential approaches to the process.…”