To Share or Not to Share: A Study of Educational Dilemmas Regarding the Promotion of Creativity and Innovation in Entrepreneurship Education

ABSTRACT

Within both society and education, economic and social entrepreneurship is considered to be of great importance. However, there appear to exist different and contradictory principles regarding the essence of this entrepreneurship. On the one hand, entrepreneurship is associated with economical concepts like competition, individual achievement and commodification. On the other hand, entrepreneurship is associated with collaboration, sharing and collective endeavors. The different notions and rationales represent a dilemma from an educational perspective, in the sense that the students may find themselves split between individual and collaborative methods and ideals. In this study, this dilemma is explored through a case study conducted in collaboration with students from the field of Social Education. The case study indicates that ambivalent notions about entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation entail a number of pedagogical challenges and produce occasional frustration among students. Especially, the students demonstrate different attitudes towards the concept of sharing ideas with their peers. At the end of the article, further educational implications of the study are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Creativity
• entrepreneurship
• collaboration
• innovation

Acknowledgements

We thanks students from the University College Absalon and the children from the School of Marievang in Slagelse for participating in the research. We would also like to show our gratitude to the pedagogues Nanna Mundt and Martin Thilemann for all their help, supervision and support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mikkel Snorre Wilms Boysen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2754-7690

Notes

1 The Danish Gymnasium is a general upper secondary education programme that prepares students for higher education.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by The Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship [grant number V14-2016-13].