Using Mind Maps to Distinguish Cultural Norms between French and United States Entrepreneurship Students

Abstract

The globalization of entrepreneurship education requires instructors to understand, and adjust the curriculum for, cultural disparities. This study investigates the impact of cultural norms on the attitudes of university entrepreneurship students in France and the United States—regions with contrasting Hofstede and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor indices. It uses mind maps from students as culturally agnostic open‐ended measures of their attitudes. Two mind maps were collected from each student, one on the appeal of entrepreneurship and one on the apprehension toward entrepreneurship, for a total of 1,213 concepts that were then scored using the Moore–Bygrave staged model of entrepreneurship to measure student likes and dislikes toward innovation, the decision to launch a start‐up, new venture implementation, and venture growth. The Shannon entropy of a mind map was used as a measure of student fixation; lower entropy indicates the student is motivated or deterred by a subset of the curriculum, whereas higher entropy indicates that attitudinal components are more balanced across the curriculum. Participating students were enrolled in similar entrepreneurship courses, and exhibited attitudes with similar entropy. However, French students found the growth stage to be the most appealing and were most apprehensive about innovation, whereas U.S. students found innovation to be the most appealing stage and were most apprehensive about the growth stage, thus revealing different contextual drivers of learning and engagement with the educational materials. This research contributes to the advancement of entrepreneurship education in two ways. First, by using mind maps and differential model‐based semantic scoring, it distinguishes between motivation and deterrence, and accounts for both cognitive and affective components of attitudes toward entrepreneurship. Second, it presents a formative assessment technique with which educators can measure students' cultural disposition to the different topics of an entrepreneurship course, and can then tailor the syllabus to this disposition. This technique can potentially improve the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in multicultural settings, such as those involving educators, students, or course material from different regions and cultures.

How Entrepreneurship Education at Universities Influences Entrepreneurial Intention: Mediating Effect Based on Entrepreneurial Competence

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Impact of Innovation Culture, Organization Size and Technological Capability on the Performance of SMEs: The Case of China

“…Similarly, Damanpour [52] found that the cultural innovation of large companies has a significant positive impact on performance. Bandera et al [53] compared the cultural norms of France and the United States and found that corporate culture plays an important role in the growth of companies. In addition, several studies have investigated the impact of innovation culture on firm performance [48,[54][55][56].…”

Gestão de micro e pequenas empresas na Engenharia de Produção: revisão sistemática de literatura

“…Finalmente, a terceira vertente mostra que a RSL retornou artigos de ensino-aprendizagem do empreendedorismo alusivo à MPE. Diversos estudos revelam que o mercado de trabalho exige que os educadores entendam e ajustem o currículo às disparidades culturais pertinentes as atitudes, autopercepções, competências, habilidades, valores e intenções dos estudantes universitários em relação ao comportamento organizacional em empresas de pequeno porte (Bandera et al, 2018;Franchetti & Ariss, 2017;Gamede & Uleanya, 2019;Gargouri & Naatus, 2019;Ghina, Simatupang & Gustomo, 2017;Ladeveze & Canal, 2016;Nguyen & Nguyen, 2018;Ramona-Diana, 2017;Saji & Nair, 2018). Outras investigações ainda abordam o empreendedorismo como forma de apoiar o discente de engenharia de produçãoe outros cursosa exercer a profissão em pequenas empresas, como evidenciado nos artigos de Glackin, Byrd e Phelan (2016), Jones e Liu (2017), Marliyah (2018), Michael (2018), Santoso (2017) e Sun et al (2017.…”