Lessons Learned from an Inside-Out Flip in Entrepreneurship Education

This paper summarizes the benefits and challenges of flipping an entrepreneurship course in two ways. The conventional flip changes how lecturers and students relate to the course content by primarily affecting when and where they learn, but not necessarily how. Flipping the classroom inside-out grounds the lessons learned in the ‘real world’ by bringing in guests to help run workshops in the classroom, and by getting students to validate their business ideas outside the classroom. This inside-out flip involves additional logistical challenges. However, it appears to be a better fit with the overarching set of attributes that graduates are expected to attain, and the assessment thereof

Levels of Multiplexity in Entrepreneur's Networks: Implications for Dynamism and Value Creation

© 2016 by De Gruyter. Relationships and networks are important to how entrepreneurs create value. However, many aspects about relationships and networks remain poorly understood because their characteristics are often reduced to one-dimensional variables or dichotomous measures. This paper unpacks the concept of multiplexity and proposes a hierarchy of four different levels (social, relational, strategic, and closed). Each level is associated with a different level of dynamism which governs how rapidly entrepreneurs can alter their network. The hierarchy of multiplexity and associated levels of dynamism, have implications regarding different value creation processes that are associated with these network conditions

Editorial: Transdisciplinary Innovation

This special issue includes a rich and nuanced set of takeaways for practitioners, academics, and members of the public or third sectors. We highlight four of them here, regarding learning, spaces, levels of impact, and partner selection. We nonetheless strongly encourage you to read the entire set of articles to make sure you get a balanced overview of different ways in which transdisciplinary innovation occurs

Student’s use of PLACE and time to develop capacity in cross-disciplinary collaboration in entrepreneurship

This chapter describes the use of a ‘flipped classroom’ environment by students of multiple disciplines in an entrepreneurship course, such that they can see each other’s use of various tools throughout the course. This is a reflective summary based on 3 years of teaching in “The PLACE”. The PLACE (an acronym for Peer Learning and Creative Exchange) is a pedagogical tool known as the ‘flipped classroom’ which enables students to have the freedom for unencumbered movement within the physical learning and teaching space. This allows them to see oral presentations by their peers, including work-in-progress on their (personal or pod’s) screens. This transparency in the classroom is mirrored with the transparency of each team’s weekly progress in the online Learning Management System. This transparency leads to improved learning of how to use a variety of visual tools by individual students, within their cross-disciplinary teams, and across teams. By understanding what students (and lecturers) do and see in the PLACE, we gain a better sense for what the right balance is between focussing on ICT technologies versus teaching methods to help students authentically develop a capacity for cross-disciplinary collaboration and entrepreneurship. This chapter is also relevant to students, desiring to understand how to leverage their learning spaces to improve their learning. This might even mean selecting courses for where they are taught over what is taught or by whom. Beyond transmission of knowledge, universities are committed to improving the professional skills of students towards desirable graduate attributes or program learning outcomes. By focussing on these softer, social skills in the classroom, students are better prepared to confidently and effectively function in the professional environment upon graduation. This chapter contributes to advocating for a holistic approach to using online technologies and physical space. This balances out the recent over-emphasis in the ‘flipped classroom’ discourse on online technologies and addresses anxieties about creating lecture podcasts and losing control of the classroom

Angel group simulation – Turning the tables on students

In most entrepreneurship exercises, students are the entrepreneurs. In this interactive exercise, the tables are turned: teams of students are angel investors, who compete against each other to allocate their seed funding. The exercise involves two rounds of a real-time simulation using google docs and portfolios of 1-page executive summaries. At face value, the objective of the simulation is to perform better than other teams, including guest angel investors. The pedagogical value includes helping increase awareness of the criteria by which their own ideas are judged. The debrief also helps students learn the motivations for angel investment deals