Coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs; more definitions won't work

Since entrepreneurship is essential to economic growth, there is a keen interest in the developing effective support programs for entrepreneurship. Within these programs, the support given to the entrepreneur as a person is key. Unfortunately, authors use various labels and definitions when referring to the personal support of the entrepreneur - the most wellknown labels being coaching and mentoring. To map out this conceptual battlefield, we compare a number of definitions and streams in the literature to put personal support in perspective. Already mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, personal support has been around for centuries, leading to a large variety of definitions, theories and methodologies. Nonetheless the literature about personal support of entrepreneurs is rather scarce. Only since the start of this century the amount of publications is growing, of which most deal with developmental interactions. Also the use of the terms coaching and mentoring can be very confusing, as some authors use them interchangeably while, others emphasize the differences. This conceptual unclarity makes is very difficult to measure the effectiveness of personal support. The elements that most researchers use in describing personal support are the agenda: i.e. the amount of control that is being used by the supporter, and the role, i.e. the focus of the support. The agenda can vary from a directive way of support to a non-directive way of support. The role can vary from focusing on the business problems or skills needed to focusing on personal development or personal growth. These two dimensions leads to a matrix of four types of support, which is called problem solving, solution oriented, focus on insight, and personal focus (Haan & Burger, 2007). In total 15 top management, entrepreneurship and psychology journals have been searched for coaching and mentoring papers. They have been refined on the use of coaching or mentoring for entrepreneurial purposes and the description of these terms. Then these descriptions were scored on the two dimensions; role and agenda. In total 1,116 papers were found in these journals. After a selecting on abstract, 71 papers were left for scoring. 51 of these papers had a complete description of either coaching mentoring, or both. In most papers we did not observe much difference in the description of coaching and mentoring. This confirms that the difference between coaching and mentoring is not clear in the entrepreneurship literature. Although most of the support is described as focusing on the development of skills or the business, some of the support is described as focusing on the personal growth. A few papers describe personal support as a free, nondirective sort of support, while the majority is described as a rather directive sort of support. For further research it would be interesting to see if the different sorts of support also have is any difference in results

Teaching teachers in effectual entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education is seen by all kind of people to be important for economic growth. Teaching entrepreneurship needs another approach. Active learning and the constructivism is mostly seen as essential. Other elements that are influencing the teaching process are the competences, the culture and the teacher. So the teacher must be capable of using other methods and theory as he is used to. Effectuation, constructivism and andragogy are the key elements for the training of entrepreneurial teachers. From that perspective there has been made an education program that will start in September 2013 for teachers at universities of applied science. Until that time there are being held some minor experiments on parts of the program

The Vocabulary at Entrepreneurial Education for Non-Business Teachers and Students: Presented at the 2nd European Entrepreneurship Education conference, Turku, Finland

As entrepreneurship is seen as very important for economic growth the education of entrepreneurship is getting more interest, not only from business oriented schools, but also from non-business schools. It is widely recognized that entrepreneurship education needs other approaches of teaching. To teachers it means that they have to change their education. In 2013 we started an training program for teachers to teach more entrepreneurial. This program is designed around constructivistic teaching and action learning. One of the things we found out during the teachers program, is that non-business teachers and students have other experiences and use other words to describe entrepreneurship. To find the right language and therefore the right teaching program, it is valuable to find out the vocabulary that people use when they describe entrepreneurship. We developed a scale of different elements of entrepreneurship according to which people can score their view on entrepreneurship. Scoring the different elements of entrepreneurship will clear for example the differences of entrepreneurial view between business and non-business students. The entrepreneurial view can be used to design the teaching program for entrepreneurial students. That view can also be used to get a better understanding among different (business and non-business) students to help them to learn more from each other. Besides that, the entrepreneurial view can also be used to discuss about that view and develop a more complete and nuanced view of entrepreneurship. With the right vocabulary the model for entrepreneurship education can be tailor-made

Teaching Teachers in Effectual Entrepreneurship.: Presented at: 2nd Effectuation conference, Lyon, France

Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education is seen by all kind of people to be important for economic growth. Teaching entrepreneurship needs another approach. Active learning and the constructivism is mostly seen as essential. Other elements that are influencing the teaching process are the competences, the culture and the teacher. So the teacher must be capable of using other methods and theory as he is used to. Effectuation, constructivism and andragogy are the key elements for the training of entrepreneurial teachers. From that perspective there has been made an education program that will start in September 2013 for teachers at universities of applied science. Until that time there are being held some minor experiments on parts of the program

Child and parental adaptation to pediatric stem cell transplantation

Goals of work: Allogeneic pediatric stem cell transplantation (SCT) is a very intensive treatment with a high mortality and morbidity. The objectives of this study were to assess the (1) self- and proxy-reported health-related quality of life (HRQoL) compared to a norm group, (2) levels of parenting stress compared to a norm group, (3) differences in HRQoL and parenting stress pre- and post-SCT, and (4) effect of child age and parenting stress on self- and proxy-reported HRQoL pre- and post-SCT. Materials and methods: Pre- and on average 10 months post-SCT, 21 children and adolescents and their parent(s) completed questionnaires on HRQoL and the mothers completed a measure of parenting stress. Main results: Post-SCT, home functioning, physical functioning, and total HRQoL scores were lower than the norm group. We found stable HRQoL scores over time with the exception of the domain home functioning, which was rated lower post-SCT than pre-SCT. Parents reported lower HRQoL scores than the children pre- and post-SCT and younger children experienced better HRQoL than older children. Parenting stress was higher post-SCT than pre-SCT and high levels of parenting stress were predictive of poor parental ratings of child HRQoL post-SCT. Conclusions: Ongoing psychosocial assessment post-SCT is necessary to target children with a lowered HRQoL and parents who experience elevated parenting stress who may be in greater need of more supportive care

Managing a dual roleuexperiences and coping strategies of parents donating haploidentical G-CSF mobilized peripheral blood stem cells to their children

Transplantation and immunomodulatio