Education and High Growth Innovation

Project Overview

The Education and High Growth Innovation (EHGI) project studies the influence of university education on the motivation and capability of undergraduates to engage in entrepreneurial behaviour.  Here entrepreneurial behaviour includes entrepreneurship both in its narrow sense of starting new enterprises, and in the broader sense of leading major innovation in existing companies.  In focusing on high growth potential, the EHGI research team seeks to isolate factors that support the pursuit of this broad view of entrepreneurship in the sense of opening new markets supporting substantial and long-term growth rather than self-employment or the formation of lifestyle or niche companies.  Equally important, the project is concerned with the factors that produce leadership of consequential if not radical innovation in established firms that feeds business transformation and growth.  Our premise -- which is subject to test -- is that while there are differences in innovation inside and outside a firm, much of the student preparation that would foster one of these forms of innovation is valuable to the other.  Examples important to both include skills and self-confidence in recognising new venture opportunities, planning new ventures, and putting plans into action.

The work has been sponsored by the Cambridge - MIT Institute.  It was stimulated by earlier work at MIT, and results of studies of entrepreneurial education at the Universities of Cambridge and Strathclyde.  Studies of entrepreneurship broadly defined led to views on the importance of using teams, open-ended projects, and engineering practice in teaching for shaping career choice and the persistent pursuit of innovative behaviours that are being tested across a range of institutional settings that now involve the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Lancaster, Sheffield, Strathclyde, York and MIT. 

The effort brings together colleagues from these universities to collaborate on research concerned with educational outcomes that are matters of capability, motivation and intent.  It is hypothesized that separate from the quality of education and a student’s understanding of the theory of engineering or other technical disciplines, the form and experience of instruction has a major influence on the student’s future choices and performance.  In particular, the study is concerned with the teaching and experience of engineering practice, including work on unstructured problems and work in teams, and the development of transferable work skills through working both alone and in groups.  The project is studying:

• Sense of mastery of analytic skills central to innovation,
• Sense of mastery of social and business skills at work that predict leadership and innovation,
• Identity and career choice in their course of study, and
• Intent to follow careers based on innovation and entrepreneurship.

EHGI began work in 2004 with a pilot study that tested its approach with a questionnaire given to 150 respondents, leading to revisions and a change in emphasis to pay particular attention to the role of industry experience.  In Autumn 2004 a major field study was launched using both paper and on-line formats that collected data on 2700 undergraduates, and another 600 surveys using the same instrument were collected in Autumn 2005 and Autumn 2006.  The results included further support for the conclusion that the effects of industry work placements are far less than expected, and provided evidence on the relative importance of classroom culture favouring entrepreneurship, industry experience, entrepreneurship courses and other factors on entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intention.  A variety of conference papers have been presented from this work, much of it pointing to the importance of authentic experience as central to the development of venturing and technology self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial intention.

The initial EHGI work has spawned a number of derivative studies, a significant current one being into the effectiveness of industrial placements.  This study was start two years ago with a pilot survey of 115 students and currently has a sample size of over 250.  The survey looks at both the pre-placement ‘matching’ of student to industry placement and in the antecedents of a value adding industrial placement.

Earlier work on entrepreneurship education and training programmes has also been brought under the auspices of the EHGI group.  In the past, that work focused primarily on Enterprisers, a week-long event originally modelled on an initiative called LeaderShape at MIT.  Since its introduction in the UK in 2003, Enterprisers has been offered nine times to over 550 participants from over 50 universities, serving as a continuing laboratory for the study of the pedagogy of entrepreneurship education and for the development of measures of educational gains.  Its three-step pre-test, post-event test and six month follow-up survey design has proven particularly effective for separating short-term transitory change from enduring effects.  Using the same research design, the metrics have also been used to evaluate the Scottish EDGE, a programme quite similar to Enterprisers except it also includes a six-week period of business consulting in teams.  This work has begun an expanding programme of study that allows the comparative study of different approaches to entrepreneurship education using the same metrics.
.
The expanded use of EHGI’s metrics was accelerated by a request in 2006 from the UK Science Enterprise Centres (UKSEC) organisation for a briefing of its members on the lessons learned from the EHGI work.  An April presentation of EHGI research results has been followed by a training programme in September to teach participants from 12 UKSEC-member universities the use of the metrics with an open structure questionnaire that enables each local university to add its own research questions.  Other workshops are planned for the 85 member universities of UKSEC, and for the SPEED programme led by the University of Wolverhampton.  SPEED is a consortium of 12 other universities investing £4 million in experiments giving individuals their own start-up experience, and they are contracting for a similar training event and the use of the EHGI core measures. 

The goal is to establish a widespread use of the EHGI metrics and research design, enabling a system to collect, analyse and compare results, providing benchmarks and insight into effective approaches and pedagogical content.  EHGI will provide: continuing research on the metrics, including their improvement and establishing their external validity as trajectory metrics towards the pursuit of entrepreneurship, and the development of new measures; training for evaluators to strengthen substantially the rigor of entrepreneurship education assessment; and a repository for data collected using the EHGI core assessment measures, along with support for a continuing and widely distributed research activity determining the lessons that can be found when one looks across a broad and diverse number of entrepreneurship programmes.

EHGI holds two or three meetings a year to review progress, to improve or redirect sections of the common questionnaire, to share findings, and to form research teams to explore particular issues.  The last workshop was held in Cambridge in July 2006, and included industry participation in a workshop that reviewed work on the role of industry work placements in the education and skills development of innovative scientists and engineers.  That workshop led to a new project using the EHGI measures in a test-retest research design to evaluate the effects of industry sandwich years.  The next EHGI workshop is planned for January 2007. 

The Cambridge - MIT Institute has been funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry, and has received a continuing grant under the US-UK Alliance programme to 2008.  The EHGI work is in direct fulfilment of the CMI objective of identifying effective educational practice and the design of new model programme to test approaches to strengthening entrepreneurship in Britain.

Last updated: April 2007