Teaching the Right Attitude

What is Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship: someone who is an entrepreneur. A person who starts a business and bears full risk of his failure but also benefits from the success.

Intrapreneurship: someone who has got an entrepreneurial attitude. A person, who works for someone else but with the right attitude that adds value to his employer. Someone who can take risks and be creative and who aims to turn ideas into profitable finished products or services.

I would personally talk about just entrepreneurial attitude and forgot this division into entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship. In today's world both, employers and employees, need the right attitude to be successful in his business or career. Some of us just need to be willing to take also all the financial risks.

Can it be taught?

It is easy to teach how to set up a business, and also all the business subjects such as financing, marketing, operations management etc. It is harder though to teach the right attitude. But it can be taught and should be taught by every teacher regardless the subject or level.

Only by teaching the attitude, we can create more successful businesses. It is important for an entrepreneur to know how a business operates, but without the right mindset he most likely ends up becoming a manager and not an entrepreneur. In my opinion, entrepreneurship education should firstly support the right attitude, and secondly teach business subjects.

I have already covered some ideas how to support the right attitude among the students. You can read more from my previous posts.

According to David A. Kirby (2006), we should focus on developing the following skills, attributes and behavior of successful entrepreneur when educating for (not about) entrepreneurship:

• communication skills, especially persuasion 
• creativity skills 
• critical thinking and assessment skills 
• leadership skills 
• negotiation skills 
• problem-solving skills 
• social networking skills 
• time management skills 

My teacher practice took place in the UK. Entrepreneurship is not one of their core subjects in the secondary education. Even though I was teaching business subjects, I was not expected to teach entrepreneurial attitude or behavior. Still, I could have promoted those skills and attributes by choosing my teaching methods differently.

One group was for example working on a business plan for an existing business. I think creating a business plan is a great way to teach about setting up a business, but it could also be used for supporting creativity. If I had been the one planning the course, I would have asked them to come up with their own business ideas. That would have supported creativity. Now they were just repeating pretty much what the owner of the existing company had told them. Yet, I was challenging some of the students, and asking them to think critically how their decisions affect the business.

If I had have more lessons with the same students I could have carried out a coursework, where the students had been asked to:

• take roles (who is the leader, who makes sure the task is done by the due date..) 
• manage the time 
• solve a problem and think critically 
• be creative and take risks 
• communicate as a group 
• assess the process and the final products

I used role playing in one of my lessons during my practice. I could have used also for example debating and networking tasks.

What kind of effect would the development of Intrapreneurial skills have on me as a teacher? Person?

I think I have the right attitude. I am willing to take risks and be creative in my work. I am also motivated. As a teacher this may actually cause me some problems: I find the school world being a bit too slow and bureaucratic sometimes. Anyway, I will keep my motivation up. Only then I can show example to the students.

References

Kirby, David A. (2006) "Entrepreneurship education: can business schools meet the challenge?" International Entrepreneurship Education. Issues and Newness. Retrieved March 14, 2013 from http://www.google.fi/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8FCUJQYaufYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA35&dq=teaching+entrepreneurship+to+business+students&ots=pewqUFl3CI&sig=Vo3TQZc6XT7W1r5Ds8Moiod-mKM&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=teaching%20entrepreneurship%20to%20business%20students&f=false

The Entrepreneurial Dichotomy

Entrepreneurship education is a hot topic at the moment. In many countries it is incorporated into national curricula, and teachers are expected to plan their teaching to meet the new guidelines. The aim is to provide youth with entrepreneurial skills in order to create more enterprises and employees with entrepreneurial mindset. This would then hopefully decrease youth unemployment and develop the business life. This all sound very promising, but...

Are companies ready for employees with the new attitude?

There are as many organisation cultures as there are companies. But how many of them do really support entrepreneurial attitude? Are the employees expected to take the initiative? Do the business cultures and policies even support employees to act as entrepreneurs? Or are schools just going to "produce" employees with entrepreneurial mindset only to hit a brick wall once they go to work life?

I can share a true story with you. I once worked in a small company where most of the workers were men. My style is to come up with new ideas and develop procedures. So there I was trying to make things in a new way with some of my colleagues with same kind of attitude. Unfortunately my boss was not happy with that, and he started to act in an unprofessional way. I am happy I did not stay there long enough to see how they would have reacted if I had ever made a mistake...

I am sure my experience is not the only one. There are many companies where even the CEO's may not have the required skills. So how can we expect them to let their employees for example to be creative, take risks and think DIFFERENTLY?  

We should also educate the existing companies and their employees in entrepreneurship

Since we budget in educating youth in entrepreneurship, we should also think how to support the existing companies. Otherwise we will loose quite a bit of the benefits from educating our youth. Some of them may learn to be passive and "just do their jobs", and the ones who keep thinking differently may face difficulties like I did. I am sure it would be in everyone's favor to support the change in the companies already now, and not just wait something to happen for generations.

I do not know if there are any EU / national projects or funding to train companies and help them to change their organisation cultures to be open for employees with entrepreneurial mindset. Maybe there could be a business opportunity there...

If some of you know about this kind of projects or existing funding or even consultants that are training companies to support entrepreneurship, please let me know.

An Idea How to Promote Entrepreneurship among the Students

I just came up with an idea how to promote entrepreneurship among the students. I think schools could find a "godmother or godfather" for each group. She or he could be an active or retired entrepreneur, who would like to visit the group every now and then, or even work with them in small projects they have in different subjects.

Do you think the idea could work?

Teaching Entrepreneurship

Yesterday I got home from InnoOmnia, where we had a two day seminar about teaching entrepreneurship. Very interesting topic indeed. I got some new ideas about teaching the subject through playing games. Also dealing with cases from business life is a good way to learn team working, problem solving and creativeness. It would be even better if the outcomes were assessed by real business people. This is something, I could think of using in my teaching. In my customer service course I could provide students with real cases from local enterprises. I already have a quite good network, which I could use for this purpose.

I still feel that the seminar was mainly for teachers, who are teaching entrepreneurship or something related to it. But how about all the other teachers? A mathematic teacher will not ask the students to solve problems related to running a business. But how could he/she provide students with entrepreneurial skills and mindset? This is something we have not really covered in our course yet, even though it is still a very important topic.

Teaching Entrepreneurial skills

The Finnish Qualification requirements for Vocational Education and Training apply key competences of lifelong learning. One of those competences is Initiative and entrepreneurship. The curricula (The Finnish Qualification Requirements in Vocational Education and Training) state:

"The student or candidate works towards completing the objectives set. He/she takes initiative and acts in a customer-oriented way as an employer and/or entrepreneur. He/she plans activities and works to reach the objectives set. He/she acts economically and is result-orientated. He/she sets personal goals in line with the overall objectives."

All these skills can and should be taught in every subject. But what are the best methods? 

I learned one interesting method the other day. Exams could be held as open book exams taken in small groups. The idea is that a group would learn to work together to find the best strategy to find, handle and reflect information in order to achieve the goal. A group that finds the best strategy usually performs the best as well. The groups can also compete against each others during the course.

Schools should also teach that failure is not bad if a positive lesson is learned. In other words, failure should be seen as an opportunity to learn something from it.

Below you can find a list of different methods that could be used when teaching entrepreneurial skills according to Jaana Seikkula-Leino (Ruskovaara, Pihkala, Rytkölä & Seikkula-Leino 2010.):

• co-operative learning
• problem-based learning
• group and peer work
• project work
• team work
• learning by doing
• pedagogical drama
• learning diaries
• school and business co-operation

In my opinion a teacher should also underline the importance of networking. For example groups and teams should be built up so that people with different kind of skills would work together. This would help students to realize that it is good to have people doing different kind of tasks based on their skills in order to work efficiently as a team. Too often students take just the easy option and work with their best friends. In work life this is not the case, and students should step outside their comfort zones.

Teaching creativeness

I found this really interesting blog by Dr. Margaret Haviland.
She states that

"Rather than a final grade, students should be getting regular feedback, constructive criticism, probing (as opposed to leading) questions from their teacher and their peers. This feedback needs to measure specific aspects of the learning as laid out in the unit or topic goals. Rubrics geared towards creativity need to be clear and based on learning objectives... Formative rubrics should be the focus in teaching creativity with summative assessment focused on the overall process as much as the product. Rubric writing with creativity as the learning goal is an area for fruitful professional learning whether it’s an all day in-service, an ongoing project with a colleague, or a workshop led by someone who feels successful. I think peers are often the best teachers.... If we want students to learn to write an analytical essay, we assign an essay, then grade it for form, style, grammar, content, and correct bibliography. If we want students to think and act creatively than the assessments we create for them must measure creativity.Ingenuity, inventiveness, originality are non-linear, iterative, and prone to failure. Failure is great!" (Haviland 2012.)

She also writes that teachers, who are creative can teach creativity well as they show example by sharing their experience with their students. Not every teacher has to be a successful author or businessman, but every teacher should be transparently sharing with their students their own creative efforts whether it’s rethinking an approach to teaching, solving a problem with the class or their engagement with an issue. (Haviland 2012)

So in a nutshell: all teaching and assessing should support creativity, and a teacher should act as a role model.

Finally, I would like to share this video by Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which teach entrepreneurship to young people from low-income communities to stay in school, recognize business opportunities, and plan for successful future.

References:

Haviland,Margaret. (2012) "Encouraging Teachers to Teach Creativity." Powerful Learning Practice. Retrieved November 25, 2012 from http://plpnetwork.com/2012/06/05/encouraging-teachers-teach-creativity/

Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. (2010) "Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship." Youtube. Retrieved November 26, 2012 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEu9boYTqUw

Ruskovaara, E., Pihkala, T., Rytkölä, T. & Seikkula-Leino, J. (2010) "Studying Teachers’ Teaching Methods and Working Approaches in Entrepreneurship Education." Lappeenranta University of Technology. Retrieved November 25, 2012 from http://developmentcentre.lut.fi/files/muut/ESU_2010_Tartto_2.pdf

"The Finnish Qualification Requirements in Vocational Education and Training." Finnish National Board of Education. Retrieved November 24, 2012 from http://www.oph.fi/english/sources_of_information/core_curricula_and_qualification_requirements/vocational_education_and_training