Fostering the entrepreneur-opportunity nexus in entrepreneurship education - a design science approach

The doctoral thesis uses the Design Science Research approach to investigate key concepts in entrepreneurship education and subsequently develops, tests and evaluates a course design for opportunity recognition in an academic setting at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Starting with a systematic literature review on entrepreneurial competences published in 2020 (Tittel and Terzidis, 2020), 57 critical entrepreneurial competences were compiled and categorized into an entrepreneurial competence framework. In addition, a conceptual definition of competence and entrepreneurial competence was developed and presented to the scientific community.
A qualitative study with 26 experts, including five entrepreneurship lecturers, ten entrepreneurs, seven consultants and four company experts, was conducted to validate the list of competences identified in the recent academic literature. The interviews were analyzed based on the text and content analysis framework proposed by Mayring (2014). As a result, the experts could confirm 39 of the initial entrepreneurial competencies. In addition, 22 new competences could be identified through inductive coding of the interviews. ... mehrBased on that, critical implications for developing entrepreneurial education could be developed and proposed. Both studies identified business idea generation and opportunity recognition as critical entrepreneurial competencies and highly relevant concepts for entrepreneurship. Therefore, a pedagogical intervention was developed, tested and evaluated in 12 entrepreneurship courses at the KIT.
A bibliometric analysis was performed to find scientific evidence and relevant associations between Ikigai and entrepreneurship. Using the Ikigai (生き甲斐) framework, a traditional Japanese concept for "life worth living", the four key pillars (What you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for) were operationalized and implemented into the pedagogical setting. The opportunity recognition course framework was then quantitatively evaluated with a structural equation model (SEM) proposed by Hair et al. (2021). As a result, the personal values-business idea fit was identified to influence the business idea’s desirability significantly. The subsequent interviews with the student teams reveal that the perceived profitability of the business idea also plays a crucial role in the perceived desirability of the business idea developed in class.