Teaching Entrepreneurship : Cases for Education and Training

Experimentation (“bring what you learned into practice”) In teaching you can enter this cycle at any stage, depending on the students. MBA students, who take entrepreneurship as one of the courses in their programme. Most of the time MBA students are mature students, who after some work experience return to the university;

“Entrepreneurship that is something you learn in practice”. “Entreprene- ship is learning by doing”. This is often heard when you tell others that you teach entrepreneurship, but maybe entrepreneurship is more “doing by learning”. Nevertheless, in entrepreneurship practice and theory are int- woven. For this reason the Learning Cycle introduced by Kolb (1984) is an often used teaching approach. According to this Learning Cycle there are four phases (“cycle”) that are connected: 1. Concrete experience (“doing”, “experiencing”) 2. Reflection (“reflecting on the experience”) 3. Conceptualization (“learning from the experience”) 4. Experimentation (“bring what you learned into practice”) In teaching you can enter this cycle at any stage, depending on the students. And that brings us to the different types of students. Based on Hills et al. (1998) a plethora of student groups can be distinguished (of course this list is not exhaustive), e.g: Ph.D. students, who do a doctoral programme in Entrepreneurship; the emphasis is on theory/science. DBA students, who do a doctoral programme that is, in comparison to the Ph.D. more practice oriented. MBA students, who take entrepreneurship as one of the courses in their programme. Most of the time MBA students are mature students, who after some work experience return to the university; the programme is practice oriented.