Entrepreneurial Mindset

Abstract

This paper explores the influence of teaching approaches on entrepreneurial mindset of commerce, design and engineering students across 3 universities. The research presented in this paper is an initial study within a larger project looking into building ‘entrepreneurial mindsets’ of students, and how this might be influenced by their disciplinary studies. The longitudinal survey will measure the entrepreneurial mindset of students at the start of a course and at the end. Three different approaches to teaching the courses were employed – lecture and case based, blended online and class based and fully project-based course. The entrepreneurial mindset growth was surprisingly strongest within the engineering cohort, but was closely followed by the commerce students, whereas the design students were slightly more conservative in their assessments. Future study will focus on establishing what other influencing factors beyond the teaching approaches may relate to the observed change.