Final Impact by FHG Photo Licenced under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

 

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

Albert Einstein

 

A design challenge:

‘How might we make a case for enterprise and entrepreneurship education from subjects A-Z by tying it to research impact in a compelling way?’

Design starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor made to suit their needs.

So in this particular challenge we’re not designing for the beneficiaries of the Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education (Ent Ed), we’re designing for the people who allocate priority and funding to lead Ent Ed across our institution.

Know where we are – the current reality of funding and the value proposition to students:

The focus of European Regional Development Agency Funding (ERDF) is fund wealth and economic growth through venture creation.

With an ERDF project, extra curricular enterprise and entrepreneurship support would be available to all students in all faculties IF they are from the UK or EU. This leaves huge gaps in provision. ERDF is designed to address market failure but ERDF is a broken model for Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education which is now about developing learners who can create multiple forms of value, not just ventures.

It is difficult if not impossible, to tie venture creation alone to impact.

So perhaps we need to view this through a different lens.

Venture creation is the result of a number of factors including people with the competence and capability to spot and validate opportunities and an ecosystem of support to allow them to figure it out and make it happen.

Entrepreneurs are two types of people. Business owners and entrepreneurial thinkers (sometimes both).

Entrepreneurial thinkers are simply people who ‘think and act in a certain way’ to design, create and capture new value.

The association of entrepreneurship with company building and business starting can be unhelpful in explaining its potential to all. That’s what the CULTure paper deals with above. (Thank you Gerasimos)

Businesses being started is just one result under the umbrella of impact.

It’s the knowledge economy… I think, or have we moved on? Perhaps it’s the networked knowledge economy I can’t recall…

Value is created through knowledge exchange, collaboration, partnerships and innovative new business models and venture creation.

As a university we are in the business of a continuous loop of research, learning (or teaching) and impact.

Impact is about value in its many forms.

We are a learning organisation and as such we want to continuously improve the quality of the results we generate and the authentic quality of the impact.

The quality of the impact is determined the quality of the thinking that goes into the planning of the research, and the design, delivery and capture of impact value that flows from the research.

If it is thinking that generates the results then the value is created by people.

That means that universities are in the business of developing people to think and act in ‘the certain ways’ that create value.

Those people are our researchers, our learning leaders and facilitators and our student customers, all as life long learners and creators of value for the university’s various other customers and stakeholders.

Customers and stakeholders will want to work with us in a more competitive environment because of our capacity to develop innovative researchers, teachers and graduates.

The students are the next generation of people who can ‘think and act in a certain way’; Social capital to create impact and value in its various forms to make a better world.

So the focus of the work to be done is to develop people (staff and students) who think and act in a certain way.

Therefore universities need to provide opportunities for people to learn to think in this certain way.

We need to provide clear pathways and opportunities, places and spaces for people to act, collaborate, cross pollinate, build, measure, learn, reflect in this certain way.

Priority  needs to be given to developing a funnel of  the people with the mindset to deliver new and innovative forms of impact. These are just some of the mindsets we’re shooting for:

• Discovery driven life long leaners
• Multi disciplinary Collaborators
• Creative problem solvers
• Design thinkers
• Value Proposition Designers
• Business Modellers
• Risk Managers
• Change Makers
• Brave Leaders
• Resiliant, confident and playful learners

ERDF does not support mindset development for ecosystem development for impact. It funds and counts ventures.

If the universities don’t prioritise the development of the ‘people for impact funnel’, nothing will change. No growth, a limit to the capacity building of social capital, a limit to our growth as an organisation, in fact universities will be going backwards.

We need to make a compelling case for core funding to make a start and explore new business models; collaboration, partnerships, cooperation, for the growth and sustainability of enterprise and entrepreneurship education for all.

This is how enterprise and entrepreneurship education and the development of an ecosystem for all is tied to research impact.

It begins and ends with developing people to create new value.