Open Workshop: Transforming entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurship education research
The aim of the Open Workshop Series in Business and Management Studies is to promote top-quality academic and applied research in various fields of the social sciences. This is a unique opportunity for sharing knowledge and networking with local and international community members.
Speaker: Professor Ulla Hytti, University of Turku, Finland
In many countries, entrepreneurship education has been increasingly included in school curricula in all educational levels. In higher education institutions, the entrepreneurship education is no longer limited to business schools and disciplines but it is offered campus wide in all disciplines. As a logical consequence, entrepreneurship education research is blooming with more active researchers, designated conferences and journals. On a societal level this trend of increasing entrepreneurship education is motivated and pushed by technological development opening up entrepreneurial opportunities.
However, recently the many societal crises, such as the climate change and biodiversity crises, the pandemic and the wars, have been put forward as drivers of entrepreneurship education. It is at this time of many and multiple crises where it is imperative to revisit the entrepreneurship education and its aims and practices. Entrepreneurship education has the capacity to both aggravate – as well as to offer (partial) solutions to –to the existing challenges. This calls for transforming entrepreneurship education practices and pedagogies in order to cultivate sustainability, social equality and hope. Simultaneously the entrepreneurship education research needs new directions: away from the functional, simplistic, “the more the merrier” approaches, to more critical approaches that acknowledge and seriously aim to analyse also the darker and unintended sides of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education. The presentation outlines a new educational and research agenda for transforming entrepreneurship education and related research.
Ulla Hytti is a Professor in Entrepreneurship at the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Turku in Finland. Her research focuses on entrepreneurship at the individual level, and most notably on entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial identity. She has received the European Entrepreneurship Education Award in 2019 and the Kerttu Saalasti Award in 2022 in Finland for her merits in entrepreneurship education research. Ulla is an Associate Editor at Entrepreneurship and Regional Development and a Research Editor at Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy since 2021. She has also edited several books and special issues and published her work in entrepreneurship journals (ETP, ISBJ, ERD). She is also currently the President of the European Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ECSB), which is the largest European network of entrepreneurship researchers and responsible for organizing two annual conferences; RENT – Research in Entrepreneurship and Small Business jointly with the EIAMS and 3E – ECSB Entrepreneurship Education conference.
University of Turku is the Finnish partner in a new Erasmus+ project ‘Transforming enterprise education, TrEE’ (2022-2024) https://transformingee.eu/ aiming at elaborating new pedagogical approaches; developing & validating relevant course designs, materials, and teaching interventions and at organizing training activities (educate-the-educator). The project is developed to address the challenge set by the consortium’s recent article:
Dodd, S., Lage-Arias, S., Berglund, K., Jack, S., Hytti, U., & Verduijn, K. (2022). Transforming enterprise education: sustainable pedagogies of hope and social justice. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 1-15.
Discussion moderated by Prof. Arnis Sauka.
Attendance is free of charge.
Please sign up for the seminar, writing to arnis.sauka@sseriga.edu by January 26, 2023.
The aim of the SSE Riga Open Workshop Series is to:
- Foster cooperation between business and management researchers, practitioners and policy makers, as well as
- To promote academic and applied research in various fields of the social sciences, focusing on but not limited to entrepreneurship, marketing, management, public administration and strategy.
Organised by the Centre for Sustainable Business at SSE Riga and supported by ESI student innovation program. The program is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and supported by Printify, SEB Latvia, and Rimi Latvija. Project number: 1.1.1 .3/21/A/008.a.
