ICSB 2012 – WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Submission 242 Entrepreneurship Education Track

ENTREPRENEURSHIP LEARNING AT THE EDGE RADICAL PEDAGOGIC EXPERIMENTATIONS AT A PARIS BUSINESS SCHOOL

Jacqueline Fendt, PhD, ESCP Europe Paris, France, [email protected]

ABSTRACT This is a conceptual pit stop after five years of entrepreneurship education at a Paris Elite Business School. Doubts about extant often highly predictive deterministic curricula have yielded radically novel approaches in terms of content, form, time, space and participant mix. Artists, fashion creators, rap musicians, but also little-educated small business owners, informal entrepreneurs, nano-scientists, geeks, hackers, philosophers and many more – were invited to set out, with our students, to find, create and accelerate entrepreneurial worlds: in the cities, in business, in life. Such creative process views that draw from a broad range of relevant and seemingly irrelevant perspectives originally aimed at complementing – and sometimes escaping from – classical equilibrium-based understandings. They have yielded much more: a radically different pedagogy that favors the unleashing of entrepreneurial potential and behavior. An unexpected collateral effect was that these experimentations transformed in many ways the entire business school. This is work in progress. Keywords: entrepreneurship education, action learning, entrepreneurial mindset, effectuation, emergence, subversion, serendipity.

ICSB 2012 – WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Submission 242 Entrepreneurship Education Track

TEACHING THE – UNTEACHABLE?

Entrepreneurship is considered by many as a principal remedy to a world facing social, economic, and ecological challenges that are no longer manageable within the boundaries of classical structures and increasingly stifled by institutions and their bureaucracies. Our schools, that are teaching entrepreneurship, are no exception to this classicism. What is the essence of entrepreneurship? Is it the “pursuit of opportunity” beyond available resources (Stevenson 2000) … Or is it “ away of thinking and acting, that is opportunity obsessed (…) with the purpose of value creation” (Timmons 1994) a “…a subversive activity (that) upsets the status quo, disrupts accepted ways of doing things, and alters traditional patterns of behavior” (Smilor 1997)? What opportunity? What value? What behavior? And how can entrepreneurship be learned or, for that matter, taught? And there is a new and powerful phenomenon: Internet. This impacts both as a facilitator of institutional control (every move we make leaves an electronic spoor behind that renders our agency and therefore our whole individual and social being increasingly transparent) and as a liberator, in which individuals and small groups can freely create purposeful networks, raise consciousness and eventually change societal structures. This requires new teaching, self-organized climates of learning, co-created in open networks. Free actors gain control over their learning and shared ownership over knowledge. We seek to theoretically and empirically apprehend, explore, explain and exploit such learning spaces and their potential to change society. We believe that there is a key in the construct of subversion. Schumpeter’s creative destruction must be the most cited term in entrepreneurship literature and yet we tiptoe around all elements of de(con)struction, failure, rule-bending and snares. We are interested in the heuristic potential of subversion, in general and for entrepreneurship and shall advance that interest. Grounded in this reality, we multiply hands-on pedagogic inquiries on entrepreneurial

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ICSB 2012 – WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Submission 242 Entrepreneurship Education Track

mindset in graduate and executive classrooms, in popular evening classes with little educated small business CEOs and/or outside in the real world. One of these exercises, briefly conceptualized in Fig. 1 here below, we are proposing to share at ICSB. Contributions include evidence:

i)

that such experiential programs create a much needed exposure to societal and managerial complexity, including a chance to fail safely, and

ii)

that such programs can go much further, and be pioneering in contributing to actually changing business school paradigm, to become less individual-centered, less elite, more open and value creating for its students and the outside world, and

iii)

that good pay-offs are achieved from strongly and regularly involving entrepreneurship students in radical, often subversive experiential moments with mixed, non-business audiences, and in diverse business and life realities ( eg. informal businesses, problematic immigrant suburbs, etc.),

iv)

last but not least, that best results are achieved when diversely mixed audiences are addressed and simultaneously, community-building is ensured (physically, by organizing matchmaking events, and contests; and virtually, by making systematic, sophisticated use of the Internet).

METHODOLOGY: ACTION RESEARCH, EXPERIMENTATION We have developed a passion for “cognition in the rough”: action research, action learning, action teaching. Action learners combine individual and organizational change of practical knowledge by getting involved in everyday organizational challenges (Boland & Collopy, 2004; Romme, 2003a, 2003b; Romme & Endenburg, 2006), Brooks, 2004; Dick, 1997; Revans, 1991, 1998) through different types of action learning (Yorks & Marsick, 2002): scientific, experiential and critical reflection (Marsick, 1988; O'Neil & Marsick, 1994; Pedler, 1991). (Etc.)

RESULTS AND IMPLICATIONS: LEARNING, COPING, COMMUNITY-BUILDING Over the years, our research body and our practice as educators have strongly converged, especially concerning curricula for entrepreneurship teaching, and known doubts about extant teaching contents and forms in this field. Radically novel teaching curricula, be in terms of content, or form or the mixing of participant profiles, have seen the light. 1200 hours of entrepreneurship teaching (‘teaching’ in very, very many senses, but always constructed with rigor and intellectual probity) have been created in five years. Art, design, fashion, but also little-educated small business owners, informal entrepreneurs, nanoscientists, geeks, hackers, philosophers and many more– and to set out, with our entrepreneurship students, to find such worlds: in the cities, in business, in life. Art and artists can help us entrepreneurs to emulate their very different ability to see the world, to project, feel

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ICSB 2012 – WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Submission 242 Entrepreneurship Education Track

and draw inspiration from the heart as well as the mind and enable what Weick calls ‘disciplined imagination’, and what Chia dubs, more radically, ‘entrepreneurial imagination’. In this vein, we have designed, implemented and conceptualized a number of experiential pedagogic experimentations, e.g. -

To stimulate both faculty and students, and to force an opening of mind from the analytic, problem-solving thought patterns toward discovery and new relationships of apparently disparate facts, we fully associate artists to our programs. This diversity in faculty and student population is trying, but worth every effort as it greatly increases our capacity for vision and paradigm discovery

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Similarly, we propose short, evening programs to small business owners, in a very pragmatic, experiential style. We associate our final year graduate students to these “hands-dirty” programs, were they must work very concretely, and together with the small business owners, on the advancement and scaling of their business.

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Grounded in these experiential programs we build sustainable communities that permit the extension, repetition and long-term transformation of the learning experience

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We give formal assignments to students to express their experience of entrepreneurial becoming in poems, essays, collages, foods, sounds, etc. This brings with it a whole series of problems to solve regarding comprehension first of all, and then in terms of “correction” and grading. It forces faculty to learn and apply new languages.

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We assign students to early-stage entrepreneurial ventures (usually ventures created by graduates of preceding classes), for interviews and for different types of consulting missions. We ask the students to translate their experiences in short video sequences and debrief during workshops.

Such exercises help us complement – and sometimes escape from – the rational, predictive, deterministic entrepreneurial toolbox of business plan writing and so on, go beyond the capacity of this synthesis and shall be developed and published further. Many of these classes figure today among the most coveted of our institution. REFERENCES (230 references, some are listed in the table below, all are available from author) * Full paper forthcoming *

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ICSB 2012 – WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Submission 242 Entrepreneurship Education Track

Table 1: Seminal voices on malaises with entrepreneurship education (compiled by author)

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