Chapter 4. Building entrepreneurial capacity through teaching and learning in the Netherlands

Developing the entrepreneurial mindset

In a changing economy, individuals are now, more than ever, required to become entrepreneurial and to create value for themselves and for others. The question is how to prepare students for this? Two key directions being taken by HEIs in the Netherlands are introducing problem-based learning and interdisciplinary research and education. Both are associated with a transition from a teacher-centric approach to student-led learning (Kolb, 2014). Problem-based and interdisciplinary learning approaches facilitate metacognitive skill development, by emphasising the importance of critical thinking, flexibility, innovativeness and soft skills (such as giving and receiving feedback, or communication and presentation skills).

Problem-based learning

One of the key foundations of much recent theory on skill development and learning styles emphasises the role of problem-based learning (PBL). PBL is used in many HEIs in the Netherlands. It is particularly valuable in interdisciplinary teams that require interactive group work and help students to experience collaboration and co-creation in academic research. Maastricht University is one of the pioneers in PBL. From the beginning, 40 years ago, the university has used and systematised PBL across all faculties with the following key learning principles (Dolmans et al., 2005):

• Constructive learning, that is, learning is an active process of creating meaning and building personal interpretations, in which students actively construct or reconstruct their knowledge based on individual experiences and interactions.

• Self-directed learning, which implies that learners play an active role in planning, monitoring and evaluating the learning processes.

• Collaboration, seen as a social structure in which two or more people interact with each other.

• The relevance of context and the understanding that learning is situated.

In order to stimulate learning, the students are confronted with realistic problems in relation to phenomena that need to be explained. Problems engage students to construct new knowledge. From that respect, the use of problems in PBL makes learning constructive and contextualised. In PBL, teachers are facilitators who stimulate students towards self-directed learning. Their main tasks are to keep the learning process going, to ensure that all students are involved in the process, to monitor the educational progress of each student in the group and to modulate the challenge of the problem. In PBL, learning takes place in small groups of students. Problems are discussed collectively and in a collaborative environment in which students learn from interacting with each other.

PBL is often employed in entrepreneurship education (Fayolle and Verzat, 2009). The main pillars of entrepreneurship education can be seen as (Kearney, 1999):

• Giving autonomy and responsibility to the students regarding the learning processes they are committed to.

• Using experiential learning, setting up learning situations and processes that enable students to learn from their experiences.

• Encouraging co-operation among students and between students and teachers in the learning processes.

• Encouraging reflexivity and inviting students to reflect on their experiences.

Enhancing interdisciplinarity

Research universities in the Netherlands have been increasingly organising some of their education and research activities in an interdisciplinary fashion. An example is the University of Utrecht, which has started to focus its teaching, research and value creation activities around four strategic themes. Each theme has to have enough breadth to accommodate several disciplines and have scope for creating real societal impact.

The strategic themes were identified through a university-wide consultation process. The following themes were identified:

• Dynamics of Youth covers the development of young people in a rapidly changing society.

• Institutions for Open Societies examines how institutions – the formal and informal rules of human action – contribute to long-term prosperity, equality and democracy.

• Life Sciences investigates causes, impacts and solutions in the area of infectious diseases and chronic diseases which pose major social problems.

• Sustainability examines the creation of a sustainable society.

The four themes receive substantial research financing and grass root pilot programmes can receive financing from the university budget of up to EUR 100 000 over four years to develop into substantive new research and education programmes. The strategic themes and associated focus areas also have their own teaching programmes. The Young Innovators programme connects with this. Around 60 students are admitted to each programme cycle, and build their skills in personal leadership, social innovation and creating impact. The Young Innovators programme runs for one year and can be undertaken alongside any master’s programme. For the first half of the year, students work on current societal challenges, for example sustainable housing for refugees, food waste, off-label drugs, transition labs, how to make a city safer through art, and accessible health services (University of Utrecht, 2017).

Capacity building for innovation in teaching and learning

Training for teaching staff is well established in the Netherlands higher education system. It has been practised through formal programmes in the research universities since 2007 and similar initiatives are being introduced in the UAS (see Chapter 1). This training will increasingly have to reflect broader changes in how higher education is organised, including more problem-based learning and interdisciplinary teaching approaches. In this respect, closer connections could be developed with training in teaching methods generally and entrepreneurship education approaches that stress co-operative learning, experiential learning and reflective learning. Spaces and mechanisms to allow teachers to share and analyse different educational practices, including entrepreneurship researchers and entrepreneurship educators, can help to support innovation in teaching and learning. To stimulate this, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science launched, in 2016, the Comenius initiative (Box 4.1).

A good example of an institution-wide approach to promoting enhanced innovation in education approaches is the establishment of the Institute of Education Innovation (EDLAB) at Maastricht University (UM) in 2015 (Box 4.2). The initiative involves a network of teachers and other staff that develop new PBL ideas to help students learn about global developments, such as emerging technologies, internationalisation and changing dynamics in the labour market.

Digital learning environments

Digital learning and the development of digital learning resources are often co‐developed across institutional borders and targeted at the needs of a more diverse student population, lifelong learning, and Industry 4.0. The NVAO and several HEIs in the Netherlands have contributed to the European Quality Assessment for E-learning framework (E-xellence), which is based on a review of a broad range of digital learning environments (EADTU, 2016). Several HEIs have taken this up and support E-learning initiatives through central funding. Examples are the Educate IT programme and the Teaching Innovation Fund at the University of Utrecht based on central-budget funded multi-annual grants for innovation in teaching and learning.

An example of how digital learning environments can be linked with knowledge exchange and valorisation is the Leiden Law Blog, which is part of the Law School at Leiden University. In essence it is a form of valorisation of knowledge and research by means of social media. The Leiden Law Blog stands out by reacting to the latest news while, at the same time, touching on the research in the Law School. The authors are legal experts or criminologists working at the university, including undergraduate and graduate students (all contributors are presented with a short profile and photo). The blog was created in 2012 and has 299 bloggers (including 110 guests made up of former staff members, alumni or students) and more than 262 000 visits (University of Leiden, 2017).

Digital learning environments also spread across classroom borders and connect different dimensions of learning. An example is HKU 24/7. Students of Utrecht Art Academy have set up a Facebook project to report on their learning and studies. They offer a glimpse into their student life with weekly blogs in text and pictures. Those personal pages lead to “traffic” from aspiring students, and the questions, feedback and interaction offer valuable material for further study choice and student learning. The Academy also seeks to learn from these experiences in making services more accessible and education programmes more attractive.

Promoting lifelong learning

The advance of Industry 4.0 calls for continuous renewal and updating of knowledge and skills. Also, the level of skills demanded by employers is constantly being raised due to a relative decline in demand for low-level skills. This makes lifelong learning opportunities important in knowledge economies.

Lifelong learning in the Netherlands is with 18.9% in 2015 almost double the EU average 10.7% and thus well-anchored in the country’s knowledge-based economy (EU, 2016). Contract education constitutes also significant source of revenues for both research universities and universities of applied sciences. To further stimulate lifelong learning in UAS, the Ministry of Education started a pilot in the academic year 2016/17 to introduce a new portfolio of flexible and demand-driven programmes with the aim of increasing participation in part-time higher education and the number of higher education diplomas obtained. Based on the results of the pilot, the government will decide whether or not to implement further programmes.

There are three main policy experiments underway:

• Learning Outcomes allows UAS to design programmes with a focus on work-based learning outcomes, for example on-the-job training, and part-time students. An educational contract between the student and the HEI states the expected learning outcomes and how these will be achieved. The educational contract gives students a greater say in what they want to learn, how and when, than has traditionally been the case, and employers are also encouraged to discuss with their employee (i.e. the student) which skills would be most valuable for the company.

• The Partial Accreditation initiative allows UAS to deliver part of higher vocational training programmes to individuals who are already working or who have acquired professional expertise and would like to pursue a higher education trajectory to obtain new skills or competences. It allows for the recognition of previously obtained competences such as professional certificates and on-the-job training.

• Education Minor is targeted at individuals who are already working in education and would like to obtain a teaching certificate for primary and secondary education.

Associate degrees

The Ministry of Education is also facilitating the design of shorter degree durations. A law has recently been passed transforming the associate’s degree, currently a short-term programme accredited within existing bachelor courses, into an autonomous degree. An example of an associate’s degree programme from Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences is given in Box 4.3.

Exchange platforms that enrich education

Exchange platforms can enrich teaching and learning by supporting HEIs to engage and collaborate with business and civic society in order to draw on real-life problems and challenges. An example is the Urban Big Data Knowledge Lab at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, which involves an exchange platform between the university and the Municipality of Rotterdam.

Some interesting lessons can be drawn from the early experiences of the Urban Big Data Lab. They pertain to different logics and routines of public administration and HEIs. These differences relate to: i) pace (immediacy in the municipality versus long term pace in the university); ii) goals (applied research for the municipality versus fundamental research for the university); iii) organisational cultures (consensus based in the municipality, highly individualised in the university); and iv) individual career assessments (based on a diverse set of activities in the municipality, and a more limited focus on funding and research output in the university).

In the early stages, these differences overlaid everyday collaboration and resulted in questions such as “why can’t we find more academics to participate?” (from the municipality) and “why do we need consensus and meetings all the time?” (from the university). The benefits of the collaboration, for both parties, however, have outweighed these tensions: the municipality has gained greatly from this new approach to evidence-based policy cycle and the university has increased the impact of its research and the relevance of its teaching.

Empowering students to co-design education activities

Even in the most advanced sciences, the practice of involving students as co‐investigators, or even as curriculum co-creators, is a powerful strategy for deep student learning (Boville et al., 2011). As part of this process, students can engage with external stakeholders in informal ways. This type of approach has been practised in other countries, for example in Chalmers (Sweden), Aalto (Finland), or Stanford (US), in the form of student-led and student-designed educational programmes. The approach is also growing in Dutch higher education. Examples are the DesignLab at Twente University and the Buro 302 at Arnhem and Nijmegen University of Applied Sciences (HAN).

The DesignLab’s accessibility to all students and its interdisciplinary nature make for an informal and “safe” environment that stimulates outside-the-box thinking. Particularly by helping each other, students also provide each other with different and new perspectives, methods and ideas that help develop entrepreneurial competencies (St-Jean and Audet, 2012).

Buro302 is a real company located on campus at Arnhem and Nijmegen University of Applied Sciences (Box 4.6). The founder and director is Professor Job Vogel. Vogel is employed by the university and of his total 1695 annual work hours as a professor, 500 hours are allocated to Buro302. Buro302 offers front-end and back-end design, mainly in the sectors of ICT and communication (Buro302, 2017). The students that work at Buro302 “learn how to learn”, from tasks, from each other, and from working with clients; in fact, they are “encouraged to fail” according to Vogel.

Linking students with the local economy

Approximately 93% of students in the Netherlands undertake an internship with a company during their higher education studies, a higher proportion than in France (84%) or Germany (79%), for example (OECD, 2014). To have a positive impact on the learner, internships need to be meaningful and relevant. This needs facilitation by the HEI. An example of how this can be organised is the De Rotterdamse Zaak (Box 4.7), developed at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. Students engage with local entrepreneurs to help them solve financial business challenges (De Rotterdamse Zaak, 2015).

The De Rotterdamse Zaak has been followed by the Amsterdamse Zaak (involving the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and the Municipality of Amsterdam), and the Gelderse Zaak (involving the University of Applied Sciences of Arnhem and Nijmegen and the local government), and more are to come (DNZO, 2017). All these initiatives engage students in problem-based learning which directly benefits their professional skill development, for example in terms of legal and business skills, and their knowledge on entrepreneurial skill building. The initiatives also connect entrepreneurial students with entrepreneurs in informal settings that offer insights into how to run a company. In pedagogical terms, what students (and businesses) learned from one project is shared across the projects.

Entrepreneurship education

Many HEIs in the Netherlands offer entrepreneurship courses and even full entrepreneurship degree programmes. The Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO), which carries out quality control of the higher education programmes, introduced, in 2013, the so-called Distinctive Quality Feature Entrepreneurship for higher education programmes (Box 4.8). As of 2017, a number of UAS had obtained the Distinctive Quality Feature Entrepreneurship, as well as one research university, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (See Chapter 1 for more information on this).

Several Dutch research universities have undertaken efforts to bring together science, innovation and business in interdisciplinary entrepreneurship education programmes and course modules. An example is the Science, Business & Innovation (SBI) programme at master’s level at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The SBI is the only university programme in the Netherlands that has obtained the NVAO’s Distinctive Quality Feature Entrepreneurship (Box 4.8). In 2017, the SBI was accredited as a separate two-year science master’s programme where students specialise either in energy and sustainability or in health and life sciences (Box 4.9).

Social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is receiving increasing interest from youth. Many young people would like to take initiative and make the world and their immediate environment a better place for all, but are not necessarily drawn into business-driven entrepreneurship education programmes. The discussion among entrepreneurship researchers of what exactly makes social entrepreneurship different from entrepreneurship (defined as value creation) may have delayed the implementation of specific social entrepreneurship education programmes, but demand continues to grow. At present, 14 HEIs in the Netherlands have active Enactus networks on campus that promote and facilitate social entrepreneurship. Overall, Enactus is present in 36 countries, supporting entrepreneurial (initiating business innovation with integrity and passion), action (the experience of social impact that sparks social enterprise), and us (student, academic and business leaders collaborating to create a better world) (Enactus, 2017).

Future policies for entrepreneurship education

When considering the development of future policies for entrepreneurship education at HEI level, attention needs to be given to the co-ordination of different policy actors. Valuable learning on this issue comes from Denmark (Box 4.10), which has introduced a close cross-ministerial collaboration on entrepreneurship with very positive effects on i) entrepreneurial skills development across all levels of education, ii) a national progression model for entrepreneurship education and training, iii) connecting national and HEI-level research efforts into the impact of entrepreneurship education; and iv) a more coherent and closer co‐ordination across the various local, regional and national initiatives.

Lessons learned from the Danish approach are that a closer and more unified approach to entrepreneurship education, not only between the relevant ministries, but also including the HEIs, can greatly improve the numbers and skills of entrepreneurship teachers and the awareness of staff and students of entrepreneurship. A nationwide initiative to improve the entrepreneurial teaching competencies of teachers, for example within the University Teaching Qualification, and building on the existing capacity of research into entrepreneurial pedagogy, could be an effective way forward in developing and refining the current practices and stepping up to the next level of excellency in the field.

If the ministries decide to establish a permanent cross-ministerial collaboration structure, as is the case with the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship, the HEIs and their representative organisations should be involved from early on in the design and implementation of support programmes. This would also include individual entrepreneurial champions (teachers, administrative staff and researchers) in the HEIs.

Measuring the impact of entrepreneurship education

The main objective of entrepreneurship education is to stimulate positive entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours, and various research has shown that entrepreneurship education has the potential to achieve this (Lackéus, 2016; Martin et al., 2012; Moberg, 2014). However, knowledge on how different educational approaches affect different types of pupils and students is still fairly limited. In order to increase understanding, HEIs should design and implement a tracking system of students and alumni to get a better understanding of the outcomes of entrepreneurship education on the entrepreneurial mindsets, knowledge and behaviours of students. Many of the most interesting outcomes only materialise years after the educational intervention and thus, longitudinal tracking is required. At the same time, teachers and practitioners also need valid information about how they influence their pupils and students in the short term, in order to be able to adjust and improve their teaching.

A competency framework to guide entrepreneurship education

The National Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Denmark has developed a national taxonomy of pedagogical practice in entrepreneurship education across different levels of education and disciplines and a competence framework for entrepreneurship (Rasmussen et al., 2015). The overall objective was to identify linkages between the overall purpose of entrepreneurship education, the concrete learning objectives, and the progression of the students.

Such a framework can serve several purposes in supporting entrepreneurship education and training across the whole educational system, including:

• Differentiation of entrepreneurship learning goals. A better differentiation of learning goals between enterprising skills (non-cognitive) and start-up and business-oriented skills (cognitive) could help to improve course content and steer students towards the courses that best meet their needs. Objectives for the higher education system could also be related to this distinction. It could for example be an objective to increase the uptake of enterprising skills courses from 12% to 50% of students and reduce the adoption goal for business-oriented skills courses from 12% to 8%.

• Alignment and progression between programmes. A competence framework can also be used to improve alignment and progression between programmes. HEIs often lack an emphasis on planning a good progression of entrepreneurial learning across different programmes. A better understanding of learning outcomes and progression can help participants in selecting the right programmes and enhancing mobility.

• Identifying the learning outcome. Another step to improving entrepreneurship training programmes is to understand the purpose, learning methodology, pedagogy and outcome of each course, in order to start evaluating, improving and multiplying best practices to other similar situations. Also, it is important to recognise that many courses may carry “entrepreneurship” in the title, without having much of a contribution to enhancing entrepreneurship as a career outcome. This is the case, for example, for many of the corporate entrepreneurship courses, which essentially are more about strategic management.

• Meaningful indicators. HEIs and the landscapes in which they operate are diverse, implying differentiated entrepreneurship support approaches. Bold quantitative indicators measuring numbers of start-ups, patents, students and courses alone are often sufficient. A more diverse but more qualitative set of outcome measures could be very complementary. For some areas the outcome measures can be generalised into numbers, whereas for others the outcome can be reflected in stories and testimonies.

• National impact measures. A further important step in advancing the current entrepreneurship support system in HEIs is to connect it with impact research to secure a continuous feedback mechanism aimed at improving current practice. Impact research on entrepreneurship demands substantial resources. Therefore, joint impact research across HEIs has greater promise.

Evaluating impacts on entrepreneurship skills and outcomes

The following section provides an overview of the focus and methods of current evaluation practices and identifies key issues that could be addressed through a national programme for research on the impact of entrepreneurship education activities in higher education. In addition, three tools are presented that have been tested and validated in international studies. These tools leverage the possibilities of ICT technology; they are useful for educators and vastly decrease the costs of performing programme evaluation. Some HEIs in the Netherlands are beginning to take up the challenge and the Dutch Academy of Research in Entrepreneurship (DARE), the Dutch Centres for Entrepreneurship, and the national network of entrepreneurship teachers in UAS form an excellent basis to enhance the research.

Impact studies within the field of entrepreneurship education have traditionally focused on whether or not entrepreneurship education increases the number and quality of business start-ups. In order to assess the short-term effects, many evaluations have focused on how entrepreneurship education influences the entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions of participants. However, this narrow focus has given way to a broader view of the role of entrepreneurship education in stimulating people to act entrepreneurially (Fayolle, 2013). Overall, it can be argued that the focus has shifted from cognitively-oriented entrepreneurial skills such as business planning, evaluation of business ideas, and market analysis, to entrepreneurial skills of a more non-cognitive character such as ambiguity tolerance, resource marshalling, sense of initiative, and creativity (Huber et al., 2014; Moberg, 2014).

However, whereas cognitively-oriented skills can fairly easily be assessed with traditional tests, entrepreneurial skills of a non-cognitive character, such as managing ambiguity and sense of initiative, are much more challenging to assess. Typically, it is also much easier to assess a precise and narrow outcome, such as the number of startups, than changes in non-cognitive skills.

The randomised controlled trail (RCT) methodology is typically viewed as the gold standard of approaches to test the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurship competences and behaviours. By using control groups and random assignment of the educational “treatment”, many threats to internal validity can be avoided and the number of variables that need to be controlled for can be limited. To randomly allocate entrepreneurship education to students is, however, not always feasible. Most assessment studies within the field have evaluated ongoing entrepreneurship education initiatives. This makes them less reliable since these initiatives suffer from self-selection bias, that is, the participants chose to participate out of interest and therefore may already have intentions to become entrepreneurs. Information on the durability of the impacts is also limited since most studies collect data directly after the intervention.

One way to solve the problem of not being able to randomise participation in the educational programme is to use propensity score matching (PSM). This is a technique developed by Rosenbaum and Rubin during the 1980s which now has wide application. It requires access to detailed information on a large number of individuals, since the technique is based on calculating the probability that an individual is likely to participate in the entrepreneurship education programme conditional on a series of observable covariates. Elert et al. (2015) is an example of a programme evaluation that used PSM in the area of entrepreneurship education, specifically to assess the impact of the Junior Achievement Company Programme, a world-wide initiative which offers students aged 15-18 the opportunity to experience running their own company for one academic year and to discover first-hand how a company functions. The researchers had access to very detailed register data on both alumni students and non-alumni students. The methodology involved matching the alumni of the programme to the non-alumni based on multiple variables, hence identifying “twins”, that is, individuals who were as likely to participate in the educational programme as the ones that actually did. This enabled the impact of the programme on the participants to be calculated eleven years after their participation.

Entrepreneurship education has many interesting effects on latent variables and non-cognitive skills, such as managing uncertainty, marshalling resources, and sense of initiative and creativity; but also variables more directly related to education, such as school engagement and educational motivation. Since 2011, researchers at the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship have collected longitudinal data on Danish pupils to assess how entrepreneurship education influences these types of latent variables in order to establish the link between these and observable outcomes.

Randomised controlled trials and longitudinal assessment studies are, however, very resource-intense and costly to perform, and they typically only give us information about a limited set of questions. Due to the topic’s increased popularity, there has been an increase in contexts where entrepreneurship education is implemented, and there are many different approaches that are applied. For teachers and practitioners, it is of crucial important to be able to assess how their educational initiatives influence pupils and students in the short term in order to be able to change and adapt their practice. It is important that these practitioners gain access to tangible information that they can apply, and that this information is provided during the implementation. In order to do this, it is important that there are user-friendly assessment tools available.

Evaluating impacts on entrepreneurial mindsets and intentions

Since entrepreneurial mindsets and intentions are typically of a non-cognitive character (Huber et al. 2014) they are difficult to assess with traditional methods. Many evaluation tools have therefore relied on self-assessment. However, the self-assessment process should be based on theoretical frameworks that identify the relevant measures for self-assessment. Albert Bandura’s concept of self-efficacy is an example, namely an individual’s belief in his/her personal capability to accomplish entrepreneurial activities and tasks (Bandura, 1997).

Another approach is the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) (Ajzen, 1991), which is particularly relevant to assessing the impact of entrepreneurship education on the intention to start a business. According to Ajzen (1991), three variables are the main antecedents to intentions: 1) attitudes towards the behaviour, 2) perceived behaviour control, 3) social norms. This assumption makes TPB a very practical framework to apply in assessment studies since it implies focusing on the impact of the entrepreneurship education on attitudes and perceived control of behaviour in particular, while controlling for social norms.

Three potential assessment tools

Three assessment tools are presented below that have been tested and validated in international studies and could be applied in the Netherlands. Each leverages technology, which offers immediate information and automated analysis both increasing the tools’ usefulness to teachers and practitioners and reducing their evaluation costs.

There are some overlaps between the three tools but they answer different questions, focus on different outcomes and thus, fulfil different needs.