From EntreComp to EntreAct: 16 Validated Design Principles for Making People More Entrepreneurial

Kapitel i bok, 2025

Sixteen action-reflection challenges around external stakeholder interaction were co-designed, developed and validated over a decade in close collaboration with around 350 entrepreneurship students at a venture creation-based entrepreneurship program at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. A novel research methodology termed Designed Action Sampling (DAS) was used alongside a digital reflection tool, resulting in capture of 754 qualitative student reflections and associated quantifications. This allowed for validating the effectiveness of these challenges in developing students’ entrepreneurial competencies. Challenges were categorized into four groups: Ideas, Resources, Actions, and Emotions. Each challenge was described using a CIMO-logic (Context, Intervention, Mechanisms, Outcomes), providing insights on a micro level into implementation patterns and effects on student learning. Taken together, these challenges represent a framework that links actions to competencies, providing an answer to the question: “Learning-by-doing-what?”. Such a framework is here termed an EntreAct framework, representing a further development of the well-known EntreComp framework of entrepreneurial competencies, previously developed by the European Commission. Findings demonstrate the importance of emotionally charged experiences in entrepreneurial learning and the value of external stakeholder interactions. A generic model for how to design EntreAct challenges is proposed, potentially serving as a starting point for a community of practice among entrepreneurship and enterprise educators using the DAS methodology to build context-dependent and empirically validated EntreAct frameworks for e.g. nursing, theology or pedagogy. This research contributes to bridging the gap between entrepreneurial competencies (EntreComp) and actionable teaching practices (EntreAct), offering educators empirically validated tools for fostering entrepreneurial competencies in diverse educational settings.