Review Inspiration session: 'Creativity, innovation & entrepreneurship within academic education'

Today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders and are expected to take a leading role in solving the grand societal challenges. This requires students and staff to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and skills like creativity, innovation and dealing with uncertainty. To increase the awareness under teachers about the possibilities of Entrepreneurship Education, a new set of teacher development workshops will be launched during the inspiration session with Bas Haring. This activity was a co-production of the Centre for Entrepreneurship and the Centre for Academic Teaching.

A special keynote was held by prof Bas Haring, who shed his light on the opportunities of increasing creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship within academic education. Bas holds a Ph.D. in computer science, and is professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Leiden University. He is the initiator and founder of the master program Media Technology, where students are encouraged to engage in small, unconventional research projects. ‘Train your students the attitude that they should not only connect to peers, but connect to themselves and to others than peers’ was Bas’ advice to the public.

Niels Bosma van het Centre for Entrepreneurship answered, together with postdoc researcher and CfE team member Yvette Baggen, the question: How do you recognize and implement evidence-informed entrepreneurship education and what does that mean for teachers? Niels suggested: ‘Start with what you have, stimulate students to use their skills.’

Rianne Poot, educational consultant, helped develop workshops on Entrepreneurial Education for teachers at universities and explained why she, too, became enthusiastic about this new type of education:

“After studying the topic thoroughly, I realized we didn't need to prep our students to become the next Steve Jobs of build a super start-up, be we need to prep our students to see the bird in their own hand and start doing something with it. We don't need to let them focus on making a lot of money, but we need to ask our students to look for opportunities in their field and create value for the people in that field. This kind of mindset could be useful anywhere!

In every field there are unanswered questions, why not prepare students via EE to identify them and try to solve them via entrepreneurial thinking?

It was as if I had EE-goggles on. Suddenly I saw the entrepreneurial mindset everywhere and how it could benefit students. So yes, I am excited to present teachers the possibilities of EE. We have developed a workshop for teachers (and preferably complete teacher teams) in which you will experience the entrepreneurial process in a pressure cooker set-up.”

Read Rianne's Linkedin post on Entrepreneurship Education here. Want to know more about the Entrepreneurial Education or EE workshops? Please contact us on entrepreneurship@uu.nl or visit the website uu.nl/entrepreneurship for more information about CfE.