Group Size
?
1.) Small group (teams of 4-6)
2.) Individual Task
3.) Large Group
4.) Any
Learning Environment
?
1.) Lecture Theatre
2.) Presentation Space
3.) Carousel Tables (small working group)
4.) Any
5.) Outside
6.) Special
Lecture Theatre
QAA Enterprise Theme(s)
?
1.) Creativity and Innovation
2.) Opportunity recognition, creation and evaluation
3.) Decision making supported by critical analysis and judgement
4.) Implementation of ideas through leadership and management
5.) Reflection and Action
6.) Interpersonal Skills
7.) Communication and Strategy
1Creativity and Innovation
4Implementation of ideas through leadership and management
7Communication and Strategy
Introduction:
Subject: Innovation Course: MSc Innovation & Entrepreneurship Year: 2019-20
A new textbook has been developed through an active ‘crowdsourcing’ partnership with my overseas students. Overseas students have historically left feedback via WMG’s end of course evaluation questionnaires highlighting the lack of broad acknowledgement of the vast differences in the contexts of starting up and doing business in developing and emerging economies versus the UK, US, Europe and other parts of the Western/Industrialized world. Language and cultural barriers mean that there is often no voice of ‘unsung’ heroes from China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Uganda and other ‘developing’ and ‘emerging’ parts of the world in our curricula. To remedy this, a new textbook along with a 13-episode YouTube series was developed dedicated to entrepreneurship in developing and emerging economies, showcasing 55 cases from non-industrialized or ‘emerging’ parts of the global economy.
This activity spanned two years where I worked with my publisher (Sage) and co-authors to develop a strategy for sourcing teaching case studies. Meaningful entrepreneurship case studies from developing and emerging economies were quite hard to source. Examples were mostly catalogued in blogs or articles online with sketchy source material. The other problem was our language skills – we had no competency in the Chinese, Turkish, Russian, Indonesian and other world languages, which meant that the Chinese, Turkish, Indonesian etc. internet and published literature was by and large inaccessible to us. I saw this as a major hurdle. Ultimately, I decided that the best way was to crowdsource cases using my overseas students. I did this by designing course work assessment such that there was a mandatory question which required students to critically analyse and reflect on an aspect of a 'case' of innovation and entrepreneurship from their country-of-origin aligned to a particular topical area in entrepreneurship. Nearly, 250 cases were collected, out of which 55 were ultimately shortlisted for inclusion. With the contributing students’ consent, the three authors augmented and contextualized the cases to particular concepts or tools that were to be explained in the 13 chapters of the ‘Entrepreneurship in Developing & Emerging Economies’ textbook. In this manner, a new textbook spanning 100,000 words was developed and published in September 2019 with extensive tutor and student resources.
In order to make the content of the above text more accessible to non-native students or to those students who did not have a business/management background, I decided to create a 13-episode YouTube series and allied quizzes. This creative endeavour required storyboarding, scripting, filming and editing footage. All of which exposed me to new skills in digital content creation; such as animation, sound recording, video editing, stock footage manipulation, video tagging, subtitling and captioning. The purpose was to make the new content accessible to those students who found it hard to read, which does sound like a cliché but nonetheless is a widely acknowledged hurdle for those academics who want their students to come ‘prepared’ to class, having read essential texts prior. I belief was: why restrict pre-module preparatory material and post-module course work writing aids to the ‘textual’ medium, when video-based content is showing greater promise in learning assimilation.
To test competence; I have designed 13, 10 question quizzes and one 50 question quiz hosted on my Module’s Moodle page. These are also available to other educators via the Sage knowledge base.
The impact has been significant; the textbook and the accompanying video series have received praise from both fellow academics/practitioners as well as students. Overseas students in particular have been very appreciative that there is now robust recognition of new models of entrepreneurship which are distinct in many ways from the often high-technology driven, intellectual property dominated silicon valley-type models of entrepreneurship taught at WMG prior. Cases such as Alibaba, Grameen Bank, M-KOPA Solar, FlipKart are now prominently featured in my teaching and the above described text and video-series shows students that non-natives have all the necessary qualities to succeed as entrepreneurs and simultaneously to home students the potential of future growth markets and the nuances of culture and context.
