The purpose of the course is to increase the students’ ability to create value by using their academic competences in a specific context. The students must be able to formulate problems and generate opportunities based on their own personality and academic competences in an integrated career course – thereby using their subject area in practice.
The students gain an initial overview of their own competences and means with a view to using their academic competences to point out academically relevant issues and challenges in practice which are recognised by other stakeholders. The students learn to generate and justify their choice of one or more entrepreneurial opportunities.
When using the Me2 model, students work in a procedural manner based on their own academic and personal competences, and disclose and explore any disharmony in their own everyday practice. This improves the foundation on which their ideas are based and creates entrepreneurial opportunities in a social process. The students also take steps towards realising value for others by their actions and by collaborating with external stakeholders.
By working with real issues using entrepreneurial methods, the students can discover that they have something to offer in the real world. The real world might seem very far away to Bachelor’s students, but these methods open the door to reality and can potentially help the students to gain an idea of their future career path.
Since this module is relatively brief, it is necessary to prioritise the phases of the Me2 model (In danish), so that students only work in depth with a few phases.
Understanding your own means
In the first phase, the students collaborate in groups on disclosing their own competences, skills and knowledge. Their main focus must be on their academic competences in view of the assigned case and issue. They also make a survey of the part of their network that may be relevant for their project.
Disclosing disharmonies
In this phase, the students are asked to find out which topic they wish to work with by disclosing disharmonies. When working with entrepreneurship, it is important that the issue dealt with is relevant to other people. In other words, under normal circumstances the students need to identify the issues themselves and then find out whether other people regard the issue they have chosen as relevant. In this course, we simplified this phase a good deal by inviting guests (for instance an MA graduate of aesthetics and culture) to present specific issues to the students.
Qualifying opportunities
The third phase asks the students to start by generating ideas, but even more importantly, to qualify and select these ideas so they can be turned into potential entrepreneurial opportunities. Ideas are generated in one or more exercises, after which the students develop these ideas and choose the idea(s) with the greatest potential for becoming entrepreneurial opportunities that can resolve the disharmonies that have been identified. These ideas are then developed through peer feedback and prototyping. Finally, the students choose the best way to resolve the disharmony concerned by assessing the appropriateness of the idea in question. The students work with this process between classes so that they can present their concept idea in the next class.
Realising value
In the last phase, the students briefly and visually present their ideas by pitching their challenges and solutions. Any prototypes are also presented here. To make sure the students maintain contact with “the real world”, project owners (for instance representatives from a museum) participate in the students’ presentation and pitching session. This gives the students the opportunity to gain feedback on their project from various sources (the project owners, their fellow students and the teachers).
The students acquire a broad approach to entrepreneurship which is not necessarily focused on starting companies, but focuses instead on creating value for others based on the students’ own resources and everyday practice. The students are introduced to an entrepreneurial method which can be used in many study-related and professional contexts.
It is important that the issues presented to the students at the beginning of the course are appropriate for the activity. They should not be too firmly defined, and the students should have an opportunity to adapt them, since working with the issues is essential in such processes. They must not be too broad – or too narrow – and they must be academically relevant.
The time factor is also important. In short courses like this, the teacher needs to compromise on some of the phases because in-depth work on all the phases is not realistic in such a small amount of time.
Carlson & Wilmot (2006): ”Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want”
Ruef (2002): “Strong ties, weak ties and islands: structural and cultural predictors of organizational innovation”
Shane & Venkataraman (2000): A Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research
Spinosa, Flores & Dreyfuss (1997):”Disclosing new worlds: entrepreneurship, democratic action and the cultivation of solidarity”, S. 1-68
Sarasvathy (2001a): "What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial"
Sarasvathy (2001b): ”Causation and Effectuation: Toward a Theoretical Shift from Economic Inevitability to Entrepreneurial Contingency”
