We believe that EE teachers may ease the ontological mismatch they face in their teaching by selecting the conceptions of entrepreneurship as opportunity creation and education as social constructionism. However, by choosing the critical realist perspective, EE teachers can use some aspects from both idealism and realism. That is, one can accept some things as existing and simultaneously accept other things as human creations. In the context of EE, this means that EE teachers may base their everyday teachings on something that they take as given, and on something they create themselves, together with their students.
The entrepreneurial opportunity creation process typically starts after people feel they have found something interesting through observing their everyday realities (according to realism). After this finding, the opportunity process continues iteratively through creation and recreation, potentially leading to a business venture (reality is created by human actions, according to idealism). The same process often takes place outside the business context as well. This process includes elements from both realism and idealism potentially causing ontological headaches for EE teachers. Critical realism may ease these headaches.
Critical realist perspective allows us to see that entrepreneurs (i.e., key actors of the opportunity creation process) are deeply embedded in their social and natural realities (environments). This means that they may interact with other people and that they may find interesting and utilizable sources for their opportunity-creating processes. As Figure 13.4 shows, the construct of opportunity includes three sub-processes (future business ideating, business modeling, and business planning). In each sub-process, the entrepreneur utilizes creative problem-solving (CPS) 1 for creating an outcome that becomes an input for the other two sub-processes in an iterative manner. Each sub-process has an idealist ontological foundation; however, the output of this sub-process is viewed as a realism-based input for other sub-processes.
By defining entrepreneurship as an entrepreneurial process focusing on opportunity creation and education focusing on social constructionism opens up new avenues for EE teachers and students. The EE teachers and students will be capable for creating opportunities rather than just finding them. Furthermore, EE teachers may apply this kind of process both in business context and outside of it, even in the educational context. In addition, this process is applicable at every educational level because it is up to the EE teacher and participating students to decide into which direction they order each sub-process.
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