Delft Educational Fellow Entrepreneurship

In January 2017 I became Educational Fellow on the topic of entrepreneurship education within Delft University of Technology. In addition to my regular research & education activities the fellowship focuses on developing a framework that aims to support the assessment of student-entrepreneurs. The question is: How to assess at academic levels the learning by students that work on building their own startup. Learning beyond the content of their startup. See below a few blogs with some of my insights regarding this topic.  

Blog 3: Universal Academic Brain: wicked problems and experiential learning

Delta, June 14, 2017 

In this third column on how to educate entrepeneurs, I will dive into the idea of a universal academic brain and look at the elements that the brain could or should cover. This blog will look at wicked problems and experiential learning.

I am developing a framework for assessing student-entrepreneurs' learning while they develop and establish their own ventures. Last week, we ended the (C)lean Tech Launchpad (CTL) – one of my pilot courses on entrepreneurship – with pitches by the nine technology ventures to a jury of investors.

The teaching team consisted of newly hired professors of practice at IDE and Prof. Marc Meyer and his team from Northeastern University, Boston. The course is assessed on three aspects: the ground covered since its start in February; the quality of the final pitch; and the business plan itself. This works for a course of six credits (EC).

In September, we will do the first run of the new course with fifteen credits: Build Your Start-up (open to all Delft MSc students, so please contact me if you have a business idea!). We can't just grade the business plan at the end of the course as this would exclude the their 'in-business' learning. Instead, I need to look at the elements that I believe belong to the universal academic brain. I introduced the notion of the universal academic brain in my second blog.

Wicked problems

Most of the literature on academic work, academic learning goals, exit qualifications and so forth are either programme specific or very general. To illustrate the latter, one of Delft's learning goals is to be "… able to synthesise knowledge and solve problems creatively when dealing with complex issues."

I understand this to mean that Delft graduates need to be able to apply their knowledge creatively to solve complex problems. In the case of student-entrepreneurs, this might be somewhat different since they need to create the knowledge in advance themselves. furthermore, once a problem is solved, new problems – or creative challenges, as entrepreneurs like to call them – emerge.

The theory of problem solving introduced by design theorists Rittel & Webber (1973) refers to this as a 'wicked' problem as opposed to a 'tame' problem. A wicked problem is " a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise. … Moreover, because of complex inter-dependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems." (source Wikipedia). Et voila, this closely resembles the never-ending entrepreneurial story of emerging and interrelated problems which cannot be dealt with until they are resolved one by one.

But because of the interrelated nature of the problems and their solutions, they need to be worked on in parallel. Hence, setting up a business is a true wicked situation. If student-entrepreneurs are to successfully establish companies, they need to be proficient in handling wicked problems. In my opinion, wicked problem solving can be learned. But what should the learning process entail?

Experiential learning

Student-entrepreneurs find themselves on a rollercoaster of dealing with wicked problems. Each step is a unique experience that results in a string of unique and interrelated experiences over a period of time. John Dewey, a twentieth century educational philosopher, advocated progressive and liberal education which sees education as part of liferather than as preparing for life.

In his view, real-life experiences are fundamental to human learning. His theory of experiences is based on two principles: 1) a 'continuity' of experiences that influences the future of the learner; 2) 'interaction' in which past experiences influence a new present situation. In other words, learners' real-life experiences in any given situation influence their future in which they apply the insights gained to the present situation: experiential learning!

Our student-entrepreneurs are immersed in a process of largely self-directed experiential learning, hopping from one wicked problem to another and gaining tons of experience that provide opportunities to learn from. But the tricky thing is that for an experience to be of any value, they need to reflect and create that value themselves. In other words, they need to be able to extract valuable insights from past occurrences when working on wicked problems. 

To conclude this third blog, we now understand that student-entrepreneurs are immersed in wicked problems that they will need to master by drawing on experiential learning. I will elaborate on this in the next blog.

Frido Smulders, Associate Professor Design, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, was granted a two-year educational fellowship by the TU Delft Executive Board in December 2016.

Blog 2: Might there be a universal academic brain …?

Below is my second blog for Delft University's magazine Delta, published May 16, 2017. http://delta.tudelft.nl/artikel/would-an-universal-academic-brain-help-me/33159

Should it exist, would a universal academic brain help me develop an assessment framework for student-entrepreneurs? This is what I hope to find out.

Constructive alignment

My first blog received more than 6,500 hits in three weeks. It seems that the subject of student-entrepreneurship and its assessment is of interest. In this second blog, I will address academic education and the role of assessment therein.

Education and assessment at academic level should go beyond the dominant bipolar true/false range by using an assessment framework which serves as a mirror image of what is expected and required. This assessment framework is based on the learning goals of the course or project. Education and assessment in conjunction with teaching activities are referred to as ‘constructive alignment’. Its starting point is to define intended learning outcomes on which an appropriate educational format is designed, which in turn should lead to defining assessment tasks. One simple example is the following. The intended learning outcome is to become a confident swimmer. To achieve this, an appropriate educational format could be to start learning to swim in a pool rather than theoretically in a classroom. One defining assessment task could then be to swim fifty metres fully dressed.

The entrepreneur

OK, my fellowship assesses the learning of the student-entrepreneur, and as I mentioned in Blog 1, no formal guiding system or framework exists that can serve as a base to define the intended learning outcomes, let alone to develop proper assessments. Yes, the students will eventually become entrepreneurs. But this is a hollow shell – we simply don’t know what constitutes an entrepreneur. At my faculty, Industrial Design Engineering, we turn out designers and there is enough literature available that describes their desired competencies. This is also the case for our range of engineering programmes. So throughout the university, we have learning goals, educational formats and assessment tasks in place, all nicely aligned. But defining an entrepreneur? It has been a fruitless quest for academics for decades. Tons of scientific publications are still ambiguous on this – there is no solid foundation on which to build an academic programme of the quality of TU Delft. So no basis for learning goals and no means of assessment! And still the student-entrepreneur has a vertical learning curve …

Mission impossible?

So why do I believe that it is possible to create a framework for assessment? The simple reason is that most of our graduates’ first jobs are in a different field than those they studied. We are proud of this because it shows that we are not a vocational institution. Our aerospace engineer becomes a management consultant; the civil engineer works in an insurance company’s strategy team. These graduates are definitely not hired for their knowledge of their educational discipline, but for some generic ‘academic’ quality: the universal academic brain.

My fellowship is based on my belief that a universal academic brain does exist. I then need to uncover its constituent elements and examine how these come about. In our current curricula, we use disciplinary content to create that academic brain. The question is, how can we create an academic brain without learning goals and without a formal curriculum, as is the case of educating student-entrepreneurs? Of course, there are lots of characteristics of what academic thinking includes, for instance, the ability to analyse, solve problems, compare, categorise, classify, persuade, empathise, synthesise, interpret and evaluate. To be honest, these abilities are far too generic. Everybody has them, even babies! To be of any use to us, each ability should have a validated framework in order to assess its academic level. That might be a starting point. However, I am a scientist and I am sure that there is a more pragmatic way to describe the universal academic brain. I aim to identify a notion of the universal academic brain that is less abstract and generic; one that is closer to real life and is more elegant than the abilities listed above. Stay tuned to see what happens next! 

Blog 1: Educating entrepreneurs and assessment of their learning

Below is my first digital column in Delft University magazine, Delta, published April 18, 2017 http://delta.tudelft.nl/artikel/how-to-assess-entrepreneurs-at-academic-level/33057

How can you best assess the learning of student-entrepreneurs who set up and grow their own companies as part of their educational MSc program? Finding the answer is the quest of my two-year Education Fellowship.

Teaching entrepreneurship is a challenging business. For instance, it is widely believed that you cannot teach entrepreneurship: budding entrepreneurs simply have to learn through practice, learning by doing. By extension, there is no formal and widely accepted theory on entrepreneurship on which to build a formal curriculum. And this is exactly what we are doing – developing educational modules that bring entrepreneurial practice into education. In our modules, student-entrepreneurs develop their own business ideas and work to bring these to fruition. This may sound straightforward, but it is precisely here that my fellowship challenge comes in. How can you assess the quality of their work at academic levels without a clear theoretical framework on entrepreneurship?

Roller-coaster

I could assess the results of the business – the product and/or technology –  but these will vary hugely from venture to venture. So what criteria should I use? Further, if the business ideas and technologies are so innovative, where do I find the right experts to help evaluate them? And even if the end result appears very simple and elegant, it hides the complexity of the process, the many iterations and the difficulties that the student-entrepreneur has encountered during its development. Of course, we could also take the marketing, the business plans and the amount of funding that the student-entrepreneurs have been able to raise into account during assessment. But how can we assess the response of student-entrepreneurs to the challenges of setting up and developing a new company? It is a roller-coaster of largely unplanned, often unforeseen and sometimes even unwanted activities, most, if not all, of which are new to these young people. Each new activity is a new experience that leads to new insights and learnings at several different levels.

Vertical learning curve

All in all, what young entrepreneurs learn is much more profound and goes far beyond purely the tangible objects like products, reports and plans. While building their companies, the student-entrepreneurs iterate, pivot, make mistakes, have successes, bump into walls, have set-backs, lose and earn money. They talk to hundreds of people like investors, suppliers, peers, banks, coaches, experts, potential clients, customers, users etc. They find themselves developing financial projections, creating their first product or proposition and their first prototype, hitting the market with a so-called minimal viable product and lots more. And they are learning all the time – the young entrepreneurs’ learning curve is virtually vertical!!

Challenging journey

This is true challenge-based learning and we, as a renowned academic institution, must be able to assess the student-entrepreneurs at academic levels. Our assessment must go beyond the actual business product and we must do our assessment without the guidance of a validated theoretical framework of what entrepreneurs should do to build their own start-up.

I am embarking on a challenging journey that connects literature on learning & education to assessing student-entrepreneurs. Along the way, I will keep you updated through monthly blogs like this. As this is such a new field, I welcome reactions and suggestions.

Frido Smulders, Associate Professor, Design, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, was granted a two-year educational fellowship by the TU Delft Executive Board in December 2016. 

Blog 0: Research leave @ Gustavson School of Business, Victoria, BC Canada

In fall 2015 and Spring 2016 I've spend about four months in total at the business school of University of Victoria, BC Canada. Below are some of my observations. 

Coming from a design school it is interesting to see how a business school looks at the now so popular idea of Design Thinking. Looking at mba-students it is interesting to see where they come from and see how they struggle with things that our design students do almost by default. One of the professors teaches some basic elements on user centered design. He makes use of a scheme of steps students in pairs need to follow and apply on each other’s needs as they were the future users. By this they experienced a very tiny bit of ethnography, inductive reasoning, designing and prototyping just to show what designer’s life is about. Based on this experience the students were asked to reflect and name some of the hardest elements related to design: iterations are difficult, what is the ‘correct’ answer, how to ask the ‘right’ questions, suspending judgment, framing the problem, etc.

On a different level, business schools seem to be interested in the subject of design. They know it is important since it moved into the C-suites of many organizations. But, how to accommodate and assimilate design (thinking) in present MBA-programs is a question they are struggling with. This is typically not accomplished by just a few courses on design, human centeredness, prototyping, creativity etc. I think that MBA’s need to do this in an elegant manner starting from the fundamental base of what design could be. However, do we as design researchers know enough about these fundamental layers of design? I don't think so … we have our blind spots like every scientist. Things that go by unnoticed in our design world might become visible seen from another perspective. And that is exactly why I spent my sabbatical at a business school, this provides contrast, and hopefully the right contrast! Keep you posted.