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Practical application of our proposal

20 April, 2016 - 16:59

Table 13.3 illustrates our proposal, which is based on the idea of seeing EE as an integration of entrepreneurship and education. We emphasize the importance of both these elements; entrepreneurship gives the context and education offers the method for EE teachers to facilitate students’ learning processes. Both of these EE elements can be based on critical realism. Further, we believe that seeing entrepreneurship through a process perspective will help EE teachers to overcome the confusion of comprehending how to exploit entrepreneurship in business, education, or any other non-business context. We also believe that this approach is valid at all levels of education and also outside business and economics studies. Our proposal is applicable for any activity students want to create for the benefit of themselves, their friends, their acquaintances, their customers, or their end-users. We use the term activity in any non-business context in a manner similar to the use of the term business to describe business opportunity, business modeling, and business planning.

As shown in Figure 13.4, we base our suggestion on the construct of opportunity consisting of three sub-processes: ideating an initial idea for future business, business modeling, and business planning. Even though these three sub-processes are typically seen as pure business-focused processes, we now apply these into the educational context and label them as follows: ideating an initial idea for a new activity, activity modeling, and activity planning. See Table 13.3 for details.

Our processual approach to EE starts after people have imagined and reached new thoughts during their everyday lives. Only some of these thoughts are worth further elaborating. If a thought is considered desirable enough, then it is time to start a business/activity opportunity process to creatively develop it into a full-blown business/action opportunity that is ready for implementation (or exploitation). As shown in Table 13.3, people will go through every sub-process by utilizing the CPS method (i.e., divergent thinking-clustering–convergent thinking in 1). This method helps people in the position of an entrepreneur or student (or even an EE teacher) to generate a lot of possible answers to interesting questions, to create expected and unexpected combinations between them, and to then select the most desirable combination to be used as an input for further CPS actions in the next sub-process. If all combinations in clustering are felt to be unsatisfactory, people may start the sub-process again. Alternatively, they may go back a previous sub-process to create a different output.

In the position of entrepreneur or student, or even in the position of EE teacher, people start asking questions when ideating, such as: Who is the customer/end-user/beneficiary? How do I get in contact with them? What is the value proposition? What is our own commitment? (See: 4 Cs in 2). After creating a great amount of possible and impossible answers based on divergent thinking, people try to find new, unexpected, innovative combinations between ideas (clustering) to proceed with the most promising one.

We believe that by using nine elements (value proposition, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partners, and cost structure) originally developed for business (Business Model Canvas (BMC) in 3, 4), it is possible to define all the elements of the business/activity model to understand that any change in one element will actually affect the entirety. Familiarizing with BMC helps in modeling elements of business/activity element by element, and to understand that any change in one element will actually affect the entirety. Any change may open up new avenues during the modeling process. It is useful to generate as many different versions as possible to see what may even be surprising ways to build future business/activity. The outcome of modeling represents a conceptual description of a desired model of future business or other activity and the input for the following sub-process.

According to our interpretation of EE literature, EE teachers have treated business planning as the key content of EE (at least at the secondary and tertiary levels of the education system). At the same time, some scholars in the field of entrepreneurship have questioned its importance (e.g., because of the strong focus on convergent thinking, that is, how to make rational plans for implementing the desired B/A model into real-life context 5, 6). However, we see that from the CPS point of view, one may use creativity (defined as novel and feasible outcome) in business/activity modeling.

Table 13.3 Business/action opportunity creation in the entrepreneurship education context

Entrepreneurship in business context

Entrepreneurship in education context

From everyday idea to ideating future business/action through Creative Problem Solving

(CPS: divergent thinking – clustering – convergent thinking) – focus on desirability

Ideating an initial idea for future business

Ideating an initial idea for future activities

Including:

Our key customer is …

Our value proposition …

We contact our customer with …

Our commitment to the idea …

Including:

Our activity benefits …

The value we try to bring to them is …

We contact our people with …

We will go as far as …

OUTCOME/INPUT:

This idea is the most promising!

This is with what I/we want to proceed.

This is how I/we like to do.

From initial idea for future action to creating Business/Activity Model through Creative Problem Solving

(CPS: divergent thinking – clustering – convergent thinking) – focus on the big picture

Business Modeling (BM)

Activity Modeling (AM)

The most desirable and selected BM includes descriptions of:

means that would generate the proposed value

customer segmentation

abilities and competences to execute BM

value gathering for business venture

entrepreneur’s satisfaction

The most desirable and selected AM includes descriptions of: means that would generate the proposed value to whom activities are meant for objects abilities and competences to execute AM what it will give for us

OUTCOME/INPUT:

Conceptual description of desired activity

From Business/Action Model to creating Business Plan through Creative Problem Solving

(CPS: divergent thinking– clustering – convergent thinking) – focus on implementation

Business Planning (BP)

Activity Planning AP)

Creating the implementation plan for the most desirable BM

Creating the implementation plan for the most desirable AM

OUTCOME:

Plan for implementing the BM/AM