Pedagogical Innovations in Entrepreneurship Course

Pedagogical Innovations in Entrepreneurship Course

Relevance of Entrepreneurship Education

The Economic Survey of 2018 predicts that Indian economy will grow at the rate of 7%-7.5% p.a. in the financial year 2018-2019. In January 2018, IMF released its forecast for India, where it estimates that the Indian economy will grow at a steady rate of 7% plus over the next two to three years.

Entrepreneurship is regarded to be an important contributor to the economic growth of a country. National governments, globally, spend large amounts of money and pay attention to the stimulation of entrepreneurial and innovative behavior.

India is no different. In 2016, the Government of India approved the establishment of ‘Fund of Funds for Startups’ (FFS) at Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) for contribution to various Alternative Investment Funds (AIF), registered with Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) which would extend funding support to Startups. The decision was in accordance with the Startup India Action Plan released by the Government in January 2016. The corpus of FFS of ₹10,000 crore was planned to be built up over the 14^th and 15^th Finance Commission cycles subject to progress of the scheme and availability of funds. An amount of ₹500 crore was provided to the corpus of FFS in 2015-16 and ₹600 crore were earmarked in 2016-17. The Fund was expected to generate employment for 18 lakh persons on full deployment......................

Design of Experiment

In order to bring about pedagogical innovations in entrepreneurship course, the following experiment was conducted in a business school setting of a premier post graduate diploma in management programme of a private B-school in India.

1. Personal copies of the magazine ‘Intelligent Entrepreneur’ published by TV18 were subscribed for three months starting January of academic year, for all the 35 students of MBA-II opting for ‘Entrepreneurship’ as an elective subject.

2. Students were told to generate assignments based on any story/article in the magazine. The nature of assignment was not prescribed. It was left to the students to decide. The only constraint imposed was that the trigger for the assignment should be only from any story/article in the magazine.

3. ........................

The Pedagogical Experiment

The faculties designed a questionnaire to measure the effectiveness of assignment given to the students. The questionnaire was given both to MBA-I and MBA-II students. The MBA-I students were to study ‘Entrepreneurship’ in the ensuing semester while the MBA-II students had studied the same in the current semester...........

Assignment Questions

I. Design a questionnaire to capture the idea used by the faculties to measure the effectiveness of assignment given to the students to incorporate pedagogical innovation in their course?

II. ......................

Exhibits

Exhibit I: Making Learning Learner-Centric

Exhibit II: Key Concepts in Entrepreneurship

Pedagogical Innovations in Entrepreneurship Course

Synopsis

This caselet will enable entrepreneurship educators to understand the process of experiential learning for engaging a class in a practice-oriented course like entrepreneurship. It provides a tool for engaging the participants of entrepreneurship course which can be of use to design an innovative assignment-based learning technique.

Prerequisite Conceptual Understanding/Before the Classroom Exercise/Reading

• Exercise – Split the class into smaller groups of 4-5 students. Assign the students a task of reading/ reviewing articles from entrepreneurship focused business magazine. Measure the impact of those readings on their understanding of theoretical discussions from classroom regarding key topics like VC funding, etc.
• The users of this case will benefit from reading the research papers shared in references section.

Case Positioning and Setting

• This case is suitable for graduate and post graduate level students of Entrepreneurship course. The case can also be used in courses like ‘New Venture Creation’ and ‘Family Business Management’.
• The case is also suitable for Faculty Development workshops or Train-The-Trainer workshops to introduce pedagogical methods for teaching courses in entrepreneurship.

...........................

Exhibits

Exhibit (TN)-I: Teaching Plan

Exhibit (TN)-II: Questionnaire for MBA-I

Exhibit (TN)-III: Questionnaire for MBA-II Students

Exhibit (TN)-IV: Summary of Responses Derived from Questionnaire I

Exhibit (TN)-V: Summary of Responses Derived from Questionnaire II