Fostering students' competence in identifying business opportunities in entrepreneurship education

Opportunity identification and, in particular, the generation of new business ideas is becoming an important element of entrepreneurship education. Researchers and educators, however, struggle with how opportunity identification competence can be enhanced. The purpose of this study was, therefore, t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInnovations in education and teaching international Vol. 53; no. 2; pp. 215 - 229
Main Authors Karimi, Saeid, Biemans, Harm J.A., Lans, Thomas, Aazami, Mousa, Mulder, Martin
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Routledge 03.03.2016
Taylor & Francis Inc
Subjects
Academic Ability
business idea generation
Business Skills
Class Activities
College students
Comparative Analysis
Competence
Control Groups
Correlation
Creative Thinking
Creativity
Creativity Tests
divergent thinking
Educatie- en competentiestudies
Education and Competence Studies
Education and Learning Sciences
Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship education
Experimental Groups
Foreign Countries
Hypothesis Testing
Identification
Iran
Onderwijs- en leerwetenschappen
Opportunities
opportunity identification
Pretests Posttests
Quasiexperimental Design
Statistical Analysis
Students
WASS
Iran
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Summary:Opportunity identification and, in particular, the generation of new business ideas is becoming an important element of entrepreneurship education. Researchers and educators, however, struggle with how opportunity identification competence can be enhanced. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to test the ability of students to generate new business opportunities when they participated in a redesigned entrepreneurship course with specially developed creativity exercises. Pre- vs. post-test comparisons showed the students who followed the course to subsequently have a higher level of divergent thinking, also with respect to the students who did not enrol in the course. The results also indicate that the course has a significant effect on the students' abilities to generate a greater number and more innovative business ideas in the experimental group; while the control group showed no significant changes in business idea generation. The implications of the results for developing opportunity identification competence and entrepreneurship education are presented.
ISSN:1470-3297
1470-3300
DOI:10.1080/14703297.2014.993419