A students' perspective on entrepreneurship and innovation in European STEM Education

A students'

perspective on entrepreneurship and innovation European STEM Education

in

1'2

C.

Bombaca Lisbon, Portugal E-mail: catarina.bombaca@BEST.eu.org 2

F. Draxler

Munich, Germany E-mail:

fiona.draxler@BEST.eu.org T. Krmac

E-mail:

2

Ljubljana, Slovenia tadei.krmac@BEST.eu.org J. Moita

2

Lisbon, Portugal E-mail: 2

Conference

Board of

Key Teaching creativity

ioao.moita@BEST.eu.org

European Students of Technology (BEST) Brussels, Belgium

Areas:

Curriculum

development;

Fostering entrepreneurship;

and innovation

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; innovation; engineering education; Technology

Board of

European

Students of

INTRODUCTION The

fast-changing nature of our world today places new demands on current and future STEM graduates [1]. Although the new “global engineer� is expected to be mainly a team player rather than an individual one, engineering curricula still largely emphasise technical skills and underemphasize the needs of the modern business world [2]. Relevant skills are not only soft skills like effective communication, good project management, and fast problem-solving, but also entrepreneurial skills. Entrepreneurial competences include, amongst others: 1

dynamic

and

Corresponding Author Bombaga catarina.bombaca@BEST.eu.org C.

opportunity recognition, opportunity assessment, risk management, creative problem-solving, value creation, and using networks [3]. Equipping students with these skills, in addition to soft skills, enables students to be more proactive and confident. According to [4-5], entrepreneurship education can be divided into three types according to its objectives: teaching “about”, “for” or “through” entrepreneurship whether it aims to increase awareness, encourage students or graduate entrepreneurs, respectively. These goals should be considered when integrating entrepreneurship into students’ curricula. Furthermore, it has been agreed that individuals, as entrepreneurs, can not only act alone but as well as part of a corporate system, instigating change/innovation within an existing business, generating economic, social and/or cultural value without necessarily creating a new organization [6].

Moreover, in the literature [7], the term “entrepreneurship” with the terms “innovation” and

can

frequently

be found

Research work within the literature

“creativity”. competences are inherent to entrepreneurial creativity competences and can be learned and taught as a transferable “meta-competence” as part of the process of personal development within an educational environment [7].

The development of CIE (creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship) competences in a holistic approach can contribute to improve an individual’s ability to face the current and evolving challenges of today, and become a “global engineer”. along

argues that

One

and innovation

fundamental

will keep pace with the with students the most suitable curricula, provide skills, and facilities. Whether soft skills, entrepreneurship education, and related CIE competences are being incorporated effectively is still a question. But more

question

is

how

universities

abovementioned trends in order to

importantly, there is an urgent need to take this analysis from most important stakeholder in education: the student.

the

viewpoint of the

European Students of Technology (BEST) is a non-political, non-governmental and non-profit student association, counting more than 3300 members and reaching with its activities more than 1.3 million technology students of 95 Universities, each one represented by a Local BEST Group (LBG), through 33 European countries [8]. One of the main goals of BEST is to increase technology students’ awareness of educational matters, in order to help students with their self-development and to transmit input on educational matters to European higher education stakeholders by collecting individual opinions from students, the academic world and companies.

Board

of

report the development of the students’ view on teaching entrepreneurship and innovation throughout the past thirteen years as well as the impact on current and future university curricula. Furthermore, the improvement of learning facilities was studied.

In

this

work

we

1 MATERIALS AND METHODS

Events

on

Education

involve students

(EoEs)

were

created

by BEST

in order to raise

awareness

and

process of education improvement. EoEs aim to bring students with different cultural and educational background,

in the

together European professors and company representatives. Insights can be produced in an area where students are often seen as passive recipients and a broader understanding of the topic can be generated. Within the scope of emerging academic publications, the

students’ voice

can

educators all around

be

amplified Europe.

to be heard

by professors, teachers and engineering

The

following paper relates to four EoEs, whose topics were either directly or indirectly related to students' perspective on entrepreneurship and innovation. An EoE organised in Porto in 2017, gathering 22 STEM students had sessions where the next generation challenges and their solutions were discussed [9]. During an EoE in Ankara in 2015, the quality of their current education was assessed by 22 European students of technology in the sessions: “European Tertiary Education; Needs, Problems, Solutions” [10]. In EoE Ljubljana 2010, “Creativity and Innovation in University Settings” was discussed, among other topics [11]. Finally, at an EoE in Zagreb, organised in 2009, 25 European STEM students tackled the needs of developing entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity in the European Union [12].

A session of

prepared time slot during which members of the BEST Educational Involvement Department act as facilitators. The role of a facilitator is to guide the session in an efficient and outcome-oriented way, encouraging everyone to participate without giving personal opinions. During the above-mentioned sessions, different kinds of facilitation methods were used, such as Brainstorming, Discussion Group, Sharing Session, World Cafe, or SWOT analysis. All these techniques were used to answer questions connected to entrepreneurship and innovation in European STEM Education. All the data collected during the sessions was processed in order to create the final extensive report of the event. an

In addition to

EoE is

a

beforehand

the

report texts individually, we performed a meta analysis by [13] scores for 34 reports of educational events organised by computing BEST. TF-IDF is a ranking method that is commonly used in information retrieval: it generates a document score based on the frequency of a term within a document and the number of documents in which this term occurs. A document obtains a high score for a term if the latter frequently occurs in the given document but is rare in other documents. Using TF-IDF rankings, were able to identify the main topics covered by the events over time and vice-versa also find the most relevant events for a given topic.

using

TF-IDF

2

THE

STUDENTS’

UNIVERSITY:

VIEW

PAST, PRESENT

2.1 Occurrence of

ON

TEACHING

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

AT

AND FUTURE RECOMMENDATIONS

“entrepreneurship”

and “innovation”-related terms

over

the

last 13 years

get a first overview of how the focus on the topics entrepreneurship and creativity has changed over the past years, the relevance of BSE reports since 2005 was analysed using a search query based on the keywords “entrepreneurship”, “innovation”, “creativity”, and “start-up”. Figure 1 shows an overview of the document scores over time. It quickly becomes apparent that before 2005, there was no mention of any of these terms, whereas starting from 2005, the occurrence of the four terms is a lot more frequent. There is a large peak with the report of the EoE Zagreb 2009 which explicitly covered the development of entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

To

—

. .0 O a:

Frequncy Document

EOE

Zagreb

.

score

0.06

53 0 4s

I

0.04

0.02

Invers

Frequncy/

.0 o m

.

EoE

Ljubljana

O

Term

0 EOE Porto

0.00-

O

.

.

.

.

3

0

o

. .

° . . .

.

EoEAnkara

.

.

.

.

2000

2005

2010

2015

Year of Event

Fig. 1. Sum of TF-IDF scores BSE reports obtained for the “entrepreneurship”, “innovation”, “creativity”, and “start-up”.

Related literature also shows

an

increase of

importance

over

search terms

time. From conventional

business education,

entrepreneurship classes started to also be integrated into other study programmes and are now part of many curricula. Entrepreneurship continues to evolve and grow, as described in [7].

2.2

Entrepreneurship classes between 2009 and 2015

The next

step was to compare this development to what students stated about entrepreneurship and innovation classes at their universities with respect to importance and quality. In the EoE Zagreb 2009 report, it was noted that “courses do not offer practical knowledge and that ideas and hands-on-work are what actually makes good entrepreneurs”. At EoE Ljubljana in 2010, students stated they wished for “better support of entrepreneurship at universities” and suggested that universities could “organise more practical projects, where students [do not only have to build] a prototype, but also make an evaluation if such a product could be commercialised”.

Finally, at EoE Ankara 2015, students stated they would prefer to have “more creative and entrepreneurship courses”. None of the reports suggested that there were already enough entrepreneurial classes.

These results indicate that

entrepreneurship does indeed not seem to have found its way into the average curriculum just yet or that it is still underrepresented. In addition, students seem to prefer a “for” or “through” rather than an “about” approach to entrepreneurship.

Similar trends

recognisable

were also identified in literature. [14] argues that there is a shift from teacher-centred to learner-centred methods: it is likely that in

the future, there will be more practical and “active” courses available to students. In addition, Vincett and Farlow describe how experiential entrepreneurship courses can

help improve

business ideas

[5].

2.3 Current

university curricula and perspectives for the future

e

Semster

per

Year ,_

I I

Credits ECTS

Sums

Area of

Fig.

mean

a

my

w;

Knowiedge

students'

point of view. The ECTS credits values represent the subject area, calculated from the curricula individually

for each

proposed by the

Figure 2,

My

2. Distribution of ECTS credits in the ideal curriculum for 2017 and

2030 from

In

Lni‘dudqc:

the ideal

students.

present (2017)

students created at EoE Porto

are

and future

(2030)

curricula that

engineering a specific make their ideal present and

summarised. Students had to allocate

amount of ETCS to the

provided subject groups to future curriculum. First, each student designed his or her own ideal curriculum. In the end. an overall mean for each individual subject group was calculated from all the curricula proposed by the students. The individual and group curricula can be seen in the EoE Porto report [9]. Less than half of the credits were awarded to Natural Sciences and Specific Technical Knowledge: this means that students attributed more than half of the credits to subjects not necessarily related to their field of study.

The most prominent non-technical area, Soft Skills, obtained 13.2% of the ECTS for 2017 and 15.6% for 2030. It was closely followed by the area Business & Entrepreneurship with around 13%.

These numbers show that students do not about their

possible subject; rather, they better prepared for their future lives.

only study in order to learn develop other skills

also want to

as

much

as

and thus be

Similariy, Edwards-Schachter et al. found that while “students seem to agree in the relevance of creativity in entrepreneurial contexts, educational institutions do not seem to promote it within their training plans” [7].

3

HOW

SHOULD

PROFESSORS

PROMOTE

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

AND

INNOVATION

major role in shaping students to become a reliable workforce during their studies. In Figure 3, the position of the participants of EoE Porto regarding their professors is summarised. Around 75% of students agree that teachers do not help them being innovative or entrepreneurial and the majority of them think that teachers do not consistently teach them how to learn.

Professors take

a

Students

Response

ms lam... .m

of

Percntage Quesllon

Fig. 3. Students' answers to specific statements entrepreneurship and innovation by professors.

on

the

promotion of

Also in EoE Porto, students discussed how teachers may stimulate entrepreneurship and which teaching approaches to use while promoting the next generation

challenges. A shortened version of the results can be seen in Table 1. For stimulating entrepreneurship, students tend to believe that connecting technical studies with business-related topics could be beneficial since several mentions to the business world are made (Table 1, left). As for teaching approaches, the trend maintains with company visits being mentioned (Table 1, right) besides the modern teaching approaches that are already incorporated in some university curricula (project-based learning, flipped teaching, skill-based teaching, seminars, case studies, etc.).

Table 1. Summarized results for the

proposed solutions on stimulating entrepreneurship approaches to promote next generation challenges.

Teaching approaches to promote generation challenges

Stimulating Entrepreneurship

Integrate

business

aspect in technical subjects

Flipped teaching

Start-up mentoring by professors

Project-based learning

a

professor as

a

teaching

next

Company visits

Innovation incubators

Pitching competitions with

and

Online

platforms (e.g. Moodle) and MOOCs

mentor

Management classes

Research

internships during

studies

Management, law and design classes

Case studies

lntemship in startups

Seminars I conferences

Promote

exchange programs

4 UNIVERSITY FACILITIES

and more companies are giving attention to the architecture of the workplace. At EoE Zagreb, while on a session about Innovation and Creativity, students noted that if the worker feels more comfortable and happy at the workplace, he can be more innovative and creative with his work [12]. In an attempt to apply this

Every

more

year,

to universities, the session “Next Generation University Facilities" took at EoE Porto. All participants agreed that the facilities where they studied

concept

place were

for their education and social life. In

important Figure 4, the most relevant ideas while facilities gathered discussing university taking into account students’ life and academics

are

clustered.

STUDENTS' LIFE

ACADEMICS

Movable walls

Examargghlss OPE:

W

.le n,

“

I

....%.....§arnlng

" "

‘

rooms

Inte ractlve boards .

.

m.

bo‘ra‘tone‘sw

'

‘

_

mm. mm

.

Bigdlsplaysmtomputersruums

mmxvx‘nme'flunfiliclifiLgvng Annountemettdisolays Man;’:uI;:ttI:a:fl|;\I:ig[:ML" mm

Students arganisations’ building Playroom .

.

(memawom

L.....Startups Incubatgmgom festivals,cancertwarhe: Stores Places to held

‘

n

Vendingmartimeswuthdrmksandsnatks . .

Whiteboards wall

Fig.

It

4. Word clouds

was

representing elements students would like to see present at their university on the perspective of academics and students' life.

understood that students desire to have

laboratories at their more

both

startup incubators and open

university. This indicates that some students would like entrepreneurial, but the university does not provide the needed facilities.

to be

CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK This research

highlights that although entrepreneurship and innovation have become a more prevalent topic among students since 2005, the trend is not sufficiently reflected in present students’ curricula. Besides having more entrepreneurship and innovation courses, students also want to have more opportunities to acquire practical knowledge and experience on entrepreneurship throughout these courses.

In order to foster entrepreneurship and getting ready for next generation challenges, students would like to see, from the university side, a better integration of business-related topics in technical studies, more company visits, incorporation of modern teaching methods, the inclusion of soft-skills in their curriculum and a bigger flexibility in the program of studies. To further improve the education in general and also to the development of creativity and innovation among students, university facilities are another important topic to be considered. Some specific elements to be included in university facilities were pointed out by the students but, in general, they have shown a desire for facilities that are designed to support them to be entrepreneurial.

REFERENCES

[1] Bennett N. and Understanding threats No.3, pp. 311-317.

Lemoine to

J., (2014), What a difference a word makes: performance in a VUCA world, Business Horizons, Vol. 57,

[2] Chan A. D. and Fishbein J., (2009), A global engineer for Journal of Policy Engagement, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 4-9.

the

global community,

[3] Morris M. H., Webb J. W., Fu J. and Singhal S., (2013), A competency-based perspective on entrepreneurship education: conceptual and empirical insights, Journal of Small Business Management, Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 352-369.

(2014), Burst bubbles or build steam? education, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial Journal of Small Business Management, Vol. 53, No. 4, pp. 970-985. intentions, [4] Piperopoulos Entrepreneurship

P.

and

Dimov

D.,

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[6] Hoogendoorn B., Pennings E. and Thurik R., (2010), What do we know about entrepreneurship: an analysis of empirical research, ERIM Report Series in Management, No. ERS-2009-044-ORG.

social

[7]

Edwards-Schachter M., Garcia-Granero A.,

Sanchez-Barrioluengo M., Quesada-

Pineda H. and Amara N., (2015), Disentangling competences: Interrelationships on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, Thinking Skills and Creativity, Vol. 16, pp.

27-39.

[8] Board of European Students of Technology, (2018, April 20), About BEST, Retrieved from https:llwww.best.eu.org.

[9] BEST Educational Committee, (2017), Education: Be part of the Next Generation, Pono.

[10] BEST Educational Committee, (2015), Principles of Effective Learning Teaching & Class and Course Organization, Ankara.

[11] BEST Educational Committee, (2010), Work virtually! Boost your speedl, Ljubljana.

and

career

at

student

[12] BEST Educational Committee, (2009), Innovations Zagreb.

in

Engineering Education,

[13] Kuratko D., (2005), The Emergence of Entrepreneurship Education: Development, Trends, and Challenges, Entrepreneurship theory and practice, Vol. 95, pp. 577-598.

[14] Sirelkhatim F. and Yagoub G., (2015), Entrepreneurship education: A systematic literature review of curricula contents and teaching methods, Cogent Business & Management, Vol. 2, No. 1052034.