International Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education Workshop (QAA 1 2 3 4 5 6 7) #FEEUK

Objective

• Develop awareness and capability for enterprise educators to explore an idea or concept as openly as possible to gather a wide range of solutions.
• Enable enterprise educators to reflect on their own learning and use that to identify future learning needs/opportunities.
• Provide the enterprise educators with a greater understanding of the principles of the Oxford University entrepreneurial ecosystem and entrepreneurship education.
• Provide the enterprise educators with practical opportunities to develop international entrepreneurship and innovation education.
• Provide the enterprise educators with a greater understanding of the importance of educating entrepreneurs through executive education and business coaching. 

Introduction 

The International Conference for Entrepreneurial Education Ecosystem annually gathers more than 200 experts, scholars, entrepreneurs, education organization leaders, entrepreneurship and innovation specialists from over 150 overseas and Chinese universities. In 2020, the 4^th International Conference for Entrepreneurial Education Ecosystem was held online and included:

• The keynote speeches from over 10 speakers from the organizations of the UK and China, including Enterprise Educators UK, Loughborough University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Nankai University, Nanyang Technological University, South China University of Technology and others.
• More than 10 workshops on entrepreneurship and innovation education topics, including integrated professional entrepreneurship and competition education, entrepreneurship and innovation education in pedagogy, agriculture and forestry, medicine, education, as well as international entrepreneurship and innovation education.

Activity 

Innocare was invited to organize, lead and host the International Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education Workshop, which was held in terms of the 4^th International Conference for Entrepreneurial Education Ecosystem. The rich experience and knowledge about the innovation ecosystem in the UK and Ireland has let Innocare attract the great professionals from the best academic organizations and executive education institutions from these countries.

Part 1: Ms. Jun Cao (Senior Development Executive - East Asia, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford) – Oxford University Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Entrepreneurship Education

As the Senior Development Executive of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Ms. Cao is responsible for leading on Saïd Business School's development strategies and strengthening the links between the business community in East Asia and the School. She has long been committed to promoting exchanges and cooperation in business and education between China and the UK, through integrating the best practices and education resources to promote positive social development.

During the presentation, Ms Cao marked out the main pain points in the UK innovation and entrepreneurship education market: 

• There is a lack of support for young people who want to start a business outside of research. Monzo (raised 325 million pounds) and Onfido (raised 110 million dollars) founded by Oxford alumni are very good examples, proving that with an ecosystem supporting entrepreneurship, start-ups in the UK and around the world can achieve large-scale achievements.
• The UK underperformed in scaling up start-ups (ranked the 13th in the OECD ranking). This is because start-ups often lack expert guidance and it is difficult to obtain investment or talents in the competition. Even increasing the proportion of start-ups that successfully expand their scale by 1%, could increase the UK’s total salary by238,000.
• There is a lack of collaboration between industry, academia and students to solve the biggest industrial and social challenges facing the UK industry strategy today.

She also shared about the current strategic priorities of Oxford University:

• The change leadership. Every year, hundreds of top 500 enterprises and government leaders gather in Oxford, and build connections in our management education classroom, get inspiration and achieve personal development and transformation. Afterwards they will use the influence at various institutions, networks and social layers, bringingmore changes. One of these examples is the "Recurring Leadership Course”. This project alone helped more than 340 British government officials complete their heavy public projects on time and on budget, saving £ 1.7 billion in UK tax payments. Oxfordside is in the process of renovating the Osson Power Station, a historic building in Oxford. With respect to the tradition and characteristics of this Victorian historic building on the Thames River, it will be transformed into a modern executive leadership education centre with first-class facilities. The centre will become the new home of global business leaders in Oxford, and will bring together the transformative energy of the best talents from all over Oxford and the global business community.
• Innovation and entrepreneurship education. Oxford Foundry brings together all the teachers and students of the entire Oxford University to maximize the influence of entrepreneurship. The centre builds a diverse student-led community that allows innovation and creativity to flourish. By supporting all 23,000 students across Oxford University, Oxford Foundry trains them to become more entrepreneurial, regardless of whether their majors are law, medicine, engineering or philosophy.

Part 2: Mr. Simon Harrison (Enterprise Programme Manager, Lancaster University) – International Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education

Mr. Simon Harrison is internationally experienced project and programme manager, specializing in business model innovation and enterprise education, who has an extensive experience of self-employment and entrepreneurship and committed to supporting development of entrepreneurial competencies in self and others.

In terms of the workshop, Mr. Harrison described a one-week programme, which was hosted by one of Lancaster’s international partners, Sunway University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and gave it as an example of their international collaboration. He underlined the following desirable points for international collaboration:

• Familiarity. There were many new and alien aspects to this experience, even for those who were from Malaysia. Most students, either  through direct introduction or through the increasing visibility of lean entrepreneurship concepts in popular culture, are familiar with the basic process. This process starts with understanding a problem from the perspective of its stakeholders, it also mobilises teams around these problems. The teams draw on their diverse perspectives to ideate various potential solutions, refine these solutions using frameworks describing sustainable value (such as the Business Model Canvas) and present these solutions using common tool (such as the Pitch Deck) to a panel with relevant experience, who further provide constructive feedback andinsights.
• Focus. As an enterprise educator at Lancaster, Mr. Harrison has observed focus to be a significant indicator of a learner’s entrepreneurial potential. Those who can identify and concentrate on what needs to be done at this moment and not procrastinate or be distracted by the countless other things that they could or would like to be doing, stand out clearly from their peers. Again, there are features of the experience that facilitate and accelerate the participants’ ability to focus. As an experienced project manager, he also recognized these as the common features of a project – there is a clearly specified deliverable, it involves a temporary organization to deliver it (that is, the team), and it involves the management of constrained resources; most significantly it is tightly time-bound.
• Meaning. While the immediate task is to deliver a specific output by a certain point in time, it is significant that theproblems to be addressed – in this case, through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals – were outside the participants’ immediate life experience.

The speaker also shared about approaches to entrepreneurship and innovation education at Lancaster University:

• Lean by design: the university activities reflect the principles of Lean Entrepreneurship, enabled by Human Centered Design tools and techniques.
• Sustainability: the university activities encourage models of value creation that are sustainable financially, economically and socially.
• Diversity: the university activities actively harness the value of diversity; of our students and our suppliers.
• Authenticity: the university activities actively bring our students into contact with other entrepreneurs, both members of the peer community and more established business leaders.
• Learning through doing: the value of the university activities is best extracted through reflection, as a result of taking entrepreneurial action and ‘failing forward’.

Together these principles underpin the university service and educational model; Lancaster University seeks to create a community of practice that engages in Social Learning. Through this, the university educators do not pretend to be experts who know all the right answers. Instead, they are also learners, but have expertise in facilitating peer interaction and reflective practice. In doing so they seek to equip their learners with the self-awareness and critical mindsets that they will need to be independent and resilient entrepreneurs in future.

Part 3: Mr. Brendan Dowling (Associate Professor, Irish Management Institute) – Educating Entrepreneurs through Executive Education and Business Coaching

In his 20 years entrepreneur journey, Mr. Brendan Dowling started, scaled and exited 3 successful companies. Today he is a chairman of number of SMEs, an experienced business coach and executive educator, who was also recruited by the Irish Management Institute (IMI) as a business and executive coach. During the workshop, Mr. Dowling told us why executive education was important for entrepreneurs and SMEs, what the optimal conditions of experience that they would like to create with IMI are, how they continue the education into business so that they get the impact that we want and what the takeaways of success are.

Why executive education was important for entrepreneurs and SMEs?

The research tells that over 50% of entrepreneurs and SMEs do recognise they need further education, but when they were asked why they are not doing it, 70% quoted “no time”, 20% said they did not have a budget and 10% said they did not have the CEO support. However, if a businessperson says that he does not have time, it usually means that he works too much in the business and not sufficiently on the strategy of the business, so he is the one who needs to join the program. According to the research, many entrepreneurs just do not know what they do not know and they tend to overstate their own skills. However, there is a very direct link between productivity, innovation and survival rate of SMEs when entrepreneurs have attended programs like those that they teach in IMI. There is a real need to beadoptable to rapidly changing environment: digital disruption, sustainability, diversity, new business and working models, digital and financing literacy, communications. Moreover, many of these entrepreneurs need digital and financial literacy in order to be more effective leaders. Equally the culture in organizations can be a key factor in holding an organization back and trying to scale and adapt.

How to continue the education into business? What are the takeaways of success?

Some of the benefits that they have seen is the increased rapid growth for SMEs, innovation and huge increase of the survival rate of companies that have attended. This creates more jobs, economic growth and skilled labour force. They also left with a very increased ambition in terms of realising the opportunities on the global scale, understanding how to compete effectively with companies from other counties and they tended to be much more motivated often by their own peers group and other CEOs on the program. It is mentioned that they also typically invest more in education after they have seen the benefits of the education themselves. In addition, this program helps to create the general awareness of the entrepreneurs in terms of understanding financial literacy, growth plans, etc.

What experience could you create with IMI?

The structure for such executive training is typically two days module and the content needs to be relevant, practical and applied. CEOs should be constantly engaged, that is why the program is built the way to be applied directly to their business. Their homework is typically to bring the learning back to their own company and to apply it within their leadership team. Peer learning groups are also valuable. These are usually 6 people in the group where theyshare their knowledge and they even tend to keep this peer group going long after the program ended. Finally, there should be a group of facilitators: academics, practitioners, experienced entrepreneurs to share their stories, executive coaches, program directors and sponsors.

Impact

• The workshop has attracted more than 100 enterprise educators’ audience.
• It received a positive engagement and feedback from learners, who reported that the activity helped them boost their knowledge about the entrepreneurship and innovation education in the UK and Ireland, compare it with the current situation in China and understand how to make this knowledge work for them in the professionalactivities.
• The activity also received a positive engagement and feedback from the overseas speakers, who emphasized thatthis was a great opportunity and a platform to share an experience and engage with the Chinese colleagues, with whom they were unfairly separated due to the current pandemic.

Resources

• External speakers.
• PowerPoint presentations provided by the speakers.

References

1.      Beresford K. EEUK Directors contribute to Chinese conference. Available at: www.enterprise.ac.uk/eeuk-directors-contribute-to-chinese-conference (Accessed: 5 January 2021).

ICEEE: International Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education Workshop. Available at: www.mp.weixin.qq.com/s/cOUJMZMmxt5I9Zm8SRT7kw (Accessed: 5 January 2021).