Abstract
There has for many years been top down, Government driven effort to place entrepreneurship into the agenda of the nation. This drive has extended into higher education at both administrative and curriculum levels. There has also been a growth in the research and teaching of entrepreneurship as a subject in its own right.
The University of Brighton’s MSc in Product Innovation and Development course has been running for 8 years, and is concerned with the process of engineering innovative new products for real world commercial organisations. The course includes a module in entrepreneurship module. The original concept behind module was to help students and their sponsors protect their innovations. Changing student requirements and in the commercial marketplace (significantly the decline of manufacturing) have meant an evolution in both content and delivery of the module towards exploiting their own ideas for themselves. The changes to the entrepreneurship module have not been driven by a government agenda, but from a bottom up, market and student driven need.
This paper outlines the evolution of the module as a case study. It includes content changes, which have evolved to incorporate legal, marketing, financial and key skills training, and changes in delivery which have evolved from a subject based methodology to a problem based learning method including the adoption of serviced learning and reward based models. The results of these changes, based on student pass marks, suggest an improvement in student achievement. Evidence based on benchmarking against course learning objectives also suggests a high degree of success. The module now forms the model for entrepreneurship training being used within the university to train undergraduates within the Business School, postgraduates within the School of Computing and Mathematical and Information Sciences, and for industrial short course provision.
The University of Brighton’s MSc in Product Innovation and Development course has been running for 8 years, and is concerned with the process of engineering innovative new products for real world commercial organisations. The course includes a module in entrepreneurship module. The original concept behind module was to help students and their sponsors protect their innovations. Changing student requirements and in the commercial marketplace (significantly the decline of manufacturing) have meant an evolution in both content and delivery of the module towards exploiting their own ideas for themselves. The changes to the entrepreneurship module have not been driven by a government agenda, but from a bottom up, market and student driven need.
This paper outlines the evolution of the module as a case study. It includes content changes, which have evolved to incorporate legal, marketing, financial and key skills training, and changes in delivery which have evolved from a subject based methodology to a problem based learning method including the adoption of serviced learning and reward based models. The results of these changes, based on student pass marks, suggest an improvement in student achievement. Evidence based on benchmarking against course learning objectives also suggests a high degree of success. The module now forms the model for entrepreneurship training being used within the university to train undergraduates within the Business School, postgraduates within the School of Computing and Mathematical and Information Sciences, and for industrial short course provision.
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 2 Nov 2004 |
Event | Institute for Small Business Affairs - Duration: 2 Nov 2004 → … |
Conference
Conference | Institute for Small Business Affairs |
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Period | 2/11/04 → … |