Experiential Entrepreneurship Education

What and why

This site is an alpha version of an aspirational resource for educators interested in experiential entrepreneurship education. Here I present resources, materials, and essays related to experiential learning in entrepreneurship and report on new games and activities developed in professional development workshops at annual meetings of the Academy of Management (AOM) and US Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE).

First principles: definition

Experiential learning means learning by doing. Experiential education immerses learners in an experience and then encourages reflection about the experience to develop new skills, attitudes, or ways of thinking (Lewis & Williams, 1994). In many cases in the context of entrepreneurship education it is not necessarily practical to create realistic experiential learning activities, though there are several exemplars of experiential learning in entrepreneurship education.

In experiential classrooms, “students can process real-life scenarios, experiment with new behaviors, and receive feedback in a safe environment. Experiential learning assignments help students relate theory to practice and analyze real-life situations in light of course material” (Lewis & Williams, 1994: 8).

Lewis, L.H. & Williams, C.J.1994. In Jackson, L. & Caffarella, R.S. (Eds.). Experiential learning: A new approach (pp. 5-16). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Last update to this section Aug 28, 2018 <placeholder for what the site seeks to achieve, what experiential learning is, and why it's important in entrepreneurship education/>

What is a game? how does it relate to theory?

A game is a specific form of play with five distinct components:

game space: a domain in which the the rules of ordinary life are temporarily suspended and replaced with "the rules of the game" that create an alternative, "model" world.
boundaries: borders in time and space such as when the game begins and ends and the spatial domain that, e.g., separates players from observers and dictates where players can and cannot be during the game.
rules for interaction: instructions that define how the game operates and establish constraints and boundaries within the game.
artifacts: objects that hold information about the game, either intrinsically or by their physical position, and allow game players to track progress and understand the game's current state.
goals: ways to know when the game is over; outcomes that all players agree to prior to engaging in the game (Gray, Brown, Macanufo, 2010).

Those components sound familiar to researchers, right? They closely mirror the dimensions of good theory. A theory is a statement of relationships between units observed or approximated in the empirical world. More specifically, a theory is a system of constructs and variables in which the constructs are related to each other by propositions and the variables are related to each other by hypotheses. The whole system is bounded by the theorist's assumptions (Bacharach, 1989). Bacharach's (1989) "components of a theory" (below) illustrates this system. When you map the components of a game onto Bacharach's model, you get the figure farther below.

Bacharach, S. B. (1989). Organizational theories: Some criteria for evaluation. Academy of management review, 14(4), 496-515.

Gray, D., Brown, S., & Macanufo, J. (2010). Gamestorming. O'Reilly.

Good theories have predictive and explanatory powers. These properties together make theories useful. Otherwise, you would be able to predict something without being able to explain why or able to explain why something occurs without being able to predict it. Imagine the frustrations within a game or experiential learning context with one of these components missing!

Benefits of Gamification

Deeper understanding of constructs and their relationships (main effects, contingencies, moderating effects) by addressing rules, interactivity, and feedback in the context of the abstract challenge of the game
Well-designed games allow participants to play with the "constructs" within the boundaries of the rules of the game to engage in deep learning regardless of education level; gamification - and more broadly, experiential learning - allows minorities, impoverished, illiterate, and other under-resourced groups to learn
Working together quickly and intensely, students learn from each other to develop shared understanding of the particular entrepreneurship concept
Gamification delivers the benefits of engaging in the design of a game

meeting pages

2018 Academy of Management Professional Development Workshop, Chicago

Bringing Entrepreneurship Concepts to Life in the Classroom through Gamification

2018 US Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE)

I introduced the concept of gamification and presented different types of gamified entrepreneurship concepts to participants.

2017 Academy of Management Professional Development Workshop, Atlanta

Phil and I introduced entrepreneurial orientation to the list of concepts open for developing learning experiences. This marked a step of incorporating broader concepts of entrepreneurship to the set of individual topic papers we used in 2016.

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