Exposing and Utilizing Context in Entrepreneurship Education

Other conference contribution, 2020

Entrepreneurial activity is never void of contextual influence.  Every new idea, product, process, and venture is embedded in networks of stakeholders, reacts to or reshapes industries, fulfills or changes the needs of customers, while bounded by conditions and driven through the interpretive insight of entrepreneurially acting individuals. Entrepreneurship education needs to empower students learning to act entrepreneurially to embrace this contextual complexity and help to prioritize how to operate in the uncertainty it generates. A recently published literature review conducted by the authors ( Reference anonymous for the review) found that context in entrepreneurship education can be described at multiple levels and structured through sociological phenomena, resulting in a framework to help better understand, prioritize and utilize contextual elements.  The contribution of this work aims to present this frame translated into a learning tool through which students can grasp, adapt or adjust contextual elements influencing their entrepreneurial activity. Supporting the tool is an interactive design through which educators can stimulate contextual awareness as well as enable prioritization of next steps for students to take based on contextual analysis, and then following action taken, substantiation of decisions made under uncertainty as relating back to contextual elements.