Creating and Testing a Game-Based Entrepreneurship Education Approach

Abstract

Entrepreneurial games are a promising tool for entrepreneurship education. Students may gain a range of competences and – if feeling satisfied with the gaming episode – develop increased interest in the field. Despite some progress over the last decade, game development and accompanying research are still in exploratory stages. Thus, further best practice examples and insights in game mechanisms are essential. We support progress in two ways. First, we present a self-developed entrepreneurial game, called inspire! build your business. Second, based on data from three inspire! game events, we explore factors influencing gamer’s satisfaction via a quantitative approach. We find that the relationship between teacher and students, the structure of the game session and the perceived gains in competency significantly explain variance in satisfaction. These insights along with the best practice example of the inspire! game may contribute to game development and teaching.