Learning-by-doing as an approach to teaching social entrepreneurship

Abstract

Many studies have explored the use of learning-by-doing in higher education, but few have applied this to social entrepreneurship contexts and application: this paper addresses this gap in the literature. Our programme involved students working with different stakeholders in an interactive learning environment to generate real revenue for social enterprises. Our results show that learning-by-doing enables students to develop their entrepreneurial skills and enhance their knowledge of social businesses. The findings also show that students became more effective at working in teams and in formulating and applying appropriate business strategies for the social enterprises. Overall, the learning-by-doing approach discussed in this paper is capable of developing the entrepreneurial skills of students, but there are challenges that need to be addressed if such an approach is to be effective.

Entrepreneurial education for students of non-economics educational programs

“…Importance of Enterprise modes of learning is in line with the findings of Chang et al [5] who report that learning-by-doing enables students to develop their entrepreneurial skills and enhance their knowledge of social businesses. Students also became more effective in formulating and applying appropriate business strategies and team-work.…”

Desarrollo de las competencias para el emprendimiento orientado a la sostenibilidad en la educación superior: una revisión bibliográfica de los métodos de enseñanza y aprendizaje

“…Barth et al, 2014;Bliemel, 2013;Brundiers et al, 2010;Chang et al, 2014;Dhliwayo, 2008;Gardiner and Rieckmann, 2015;Lehmann et al, 2008;McCrea, 2010). Nevertheless, to date there is no comprehensive literature review dealing with teaching-learning approaches and methods of higher education for sustainability-driven entrepreneurship.…”

Introduction

“…Here, the authors also have the luxury of an already established discursive resource, which speaks of entrepreneurship education and the approaches for incorporating sustainability in undergraduate courses and programs (Andersson and Öhman, 2015;Figueiró and Raufflet, 2015). Their literature review draws together different streams of research on entrepreneurship education in a convergent manner, that is, to demonstrate agreement concerning the need to advance sustainability from content-led strategy to renew undergraduate entrepreneurship education to more learning-based approaches: the experiential-based learning perspective and the community-based learning perspective (Kolb, A. and Kolb, 2005;Chang et al, 2014). The authors argue that neither of these approaches addresses the 'how-to' question sufficiently, that is, how business schools develop sustainable entrepreneurship undergraduate courses that recognize the role of active participation for developing knowledge and skills as students participate in a community of practice.…”