Supporting Digital Innovations By Interdisciplinary Entrepreneurial Learning

Abstract

Digitalization signifies transformational or disruptive implications of digital technologies for businesses (new business and work models, new types of products/services, new types of customer). Digital technologies support new forms of innovation and entrepreneurial initiatives which hold implications at regional/national and societal and influence educators, policy making entities and other stakeholders. The formation of the entrepreneur as a person for digital transformation is important and considered, in a large part, to be due to learning. Entrepreneurship is “a process of new value creation” and digital entrepreneurship is understood as “a subcategory of entrepreneurship in which some or all of what would be physical in a traditional organization has been digitized”. Existing research on the digitalization of innovation and entrepreneurship refers mostly to specific fields or disciplines (e.g., marketing, economics, information systems, operations, strategy) and arguably, limited effort has been spent so far on adopting a more interdisciplinary view of the underlying issues. Disruptive innovation and entrepreneurs are strongly connected. Entrepreneurs are often the ones that develop new products or services that change an entire industry and  disruptive innovation  has the potential to improve student/employees outcomes also during their entrepreneurial education and training. Particularly it happens by breaking boundaries for an interdisciplinary entrepreneurial learning. After the Introduction, the paper includes results of literature review and of interviews the author done with entrepreneurs within some European projects about different forms of innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly digital disruptive innovation and entrepreneurship. A review of literature about entrepreneurial learning and basis components, which characterize it, are given in part 3. It includes also experience of the author in teaching and training entrepreneurs. The last part of the paper presents some interdisciplinary new approaches within entrepreneurial learning oriented to disruptive, digital innovation and digital entrepreneurship.  Developments within a European project with the participation of the author are also given.