Mapping and navigating context for opportunity development: The Context Hive – a research-based framework

Abstract

Contextual elements play an important role in entrepreneurial activities and learning processes. However, context is often taken for granted rather than being viewed as an asset, which may lead to missed opportunities, missed potential solutions and missed learning. Entrepreneurship education should therefore prepare and empower students to act entrepreneurially in their individual, unique context. A student-centric pedagogical approach is required to build this metacognitive understanding and enable students to ultimately self-manage their own process, embedded in and influenced by context. This paper presents a framework, the Context Hive, which enables students to understand and work with the impact of context on their entrepreneurial activity. The Context Hive translates entrepreneurship and context theories into educational (and entrepreneurial) practice by structuring complexity and uncertainty in ways that help students to better grasp, adapt or adjust to contextual elements. Using the research-based framework facilitates dialogue, builds awareness and enables prioritization of actions based on contextual analysis. In this way, the classroom is no longer limited to one perspective and educator and student share responsibility for how learning is designed, which provides a means for educators and students to raise awareness of how context influences entrepreneurial activity, making it navigable.

Reinterpreting a signature pedagogy for entrepreneurship education

“…We understand context as malleable and infused by the individual (Baker and Welter, 2020). In EE, this perspective suggests that agency is anchored in individuals (Archer, 1995) who influence, first of all, their immediate context by their action(s), but at the same time, context, generally through collective action (Ramsgaard et al , 2021). Furthermore, the development of higher education institutions (HEIs) can historically be described as institutionalization of particular forms of higher education and the differentiation of education into specialized disciplinary and professional departments, faculties and schools.…”

Reframing the Case Method in Entrepreneurship Education

“…We draw inspiration from the sense-making perspective of Weick, who called for changing the research perspective from 'nouns to verbs' (Bakken & Hernes, 2006), accentuating the understanding that researchers should investigate the actionable aspects of phenomena. With this notion, we aim to address the contextualizing processes related to casework in the entrepreneurship education classroom (Ramsgaard et al, 2021;Thomassen et al, 2020). Positioning entrepreneurship education within a notion of action has certain benefits, articulating an action turned into learning (Reason & Torbert, 2001).…”

Listening to Leaders

“…Identification of community entrepreneurship leaders' definitions of successful entrepreneurship education enables the alignment of goals and values for developing entrepreneurial students who can successfully navigate current and future societal demands and opportunities (Bischoff et al, 2018). Ramsgaard et al (2021) argued that context matters when defining entrepreneurship education and developed a "Context Hive" model to guide learning conversations between higher education educators and students about how entrepreneurship can be enacted within the local context. Teachers were reported to have moved away from directing what resources and contacts should be approached to allow students to explore and build their own networking skills while ensuring students were aware of what would be possible within the context (Ramsgaard et al, 2021).…”

“…Ramsgaard et al (2021) argued that context matters when defining entrepreneurship education and developed a "Context Hive" model to guide learning conversations between higher education educators and students about how entrepreneurship can be enacted within the local context. Teachers were reported to have moved away from directing what resources and contacts should be approached to allow students to explore and build their own networking skills while ensuring students were aware of what would be possible within the context (Ramsgaard et al, 2021).…”

“…Local research into entrepreneurship education leadership could take into consideration local values for leadership styles (Daniëls et al, 2019;Fisher, 2021;Tan, 2018) and preferences for student's entrepreneurial learning (Hardie et al, 2022b) within the current context for entrepreneurship (Ramsgaard et al, 2021). An analogy for growing local understanding of effectively implementing entrepreneurship education through research is presented in Figure 2.…”