Teaching Matters Newsletter March 2024: Five take-aways from the 'Embedding enterprise in the curriculum' series

Ross' Collegiate Commentary

The importance of developing “un-employability skills” in our student cohorts.

Whatever a student’s destination, the development of an entrepreneurial mindset will positively contribute to their career development.

When I was asked by Professor Mark Logan, Chief Entrepreneurial Advisor to the Scottish Government, to co-author (with my colleague and good friend Professor Joe Little) a paper that outlined the attributes of a successful Entrepreneurial Campus↗️, I was inspired by the sheer scale of opportunity there is to further leverage the impact of our 43 further and higher educational institutions in Scotland. I was filled with an optimism and belief that has continued to grow over the two years since we started researching this subject.

As we developed our thinking, I realised that what was actually inspiring me was the potential we have to impact the lives and careers of our students, by broadening the spectrum of positive destinations and outcomes available to them, one of the core aims of any education. Through our world class learning and teaching, we enable our students to develop the capacities and capabilities that are vital for their future success. We often refer to these as capacities and capabilities as “employability skills” or “graduate attributes”.

To this list of skills and attributes, I would also add “un-employability skills”. What do I mean by this…? As an employer, alongside technical expertise and knowledge, the core capacities I look for in potential employees are:

• Creativity
• Critical thinking
• Problem solving
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Initiative
• Flexibility, etc

As the founder of a startup and ultimately a scaleup, I also look for additional skills in potential employees, skills that we might attribute more to an entrepreneur than an employee:

• Comfort with risk
• Future orientation
• Opportunity identification
• Adaptability
• Self-reliance, etc

My experience is that employees who arrive with these capacities contribute more to the organisation’s success than those without.

I believe that there is a strong overlap between what we often call an “employability mindset” and something we refer to as an “entrepreneurial mindset”. However, it is important to call out the particular capacities that differentiate and give students an edge, whether that leads to greater resilience of the individual or helps them to maximise their potential in the career they choose.

Whatever role a student ends up in, these attributes are critical for progression and development. Many organisations spend significant amounts of their training budgets developing the conditions and capacities in their staff that encourage intrapreneurial behaviours and approaches within their workforce, with the aim of driving up productivity, gaining greater market share or simply creating better working conditions for their employees or better outcomes for their customers/clients. Helping students develop these capacities and skills whilst at university will certainly give them a head start in their career.

Driving positive socio-economic impact

As well as being core to “employability”, we also need to look at how founders (and the teams they build) contribute to the local and national economy (both socially and economically). Every job (and the impact from it) that we see today is the result of someone, somewhere, starting something. By opening the minds of our students to the potential that they have to make an impact (whether that is within someone else’s business or within their own) we give them more options in terms of ways to engage with the world through their future career.

Inspire through impact

Developing an entrepreneurial mindset can often start with engagement in “innovative and creative thinking”. For example, Durham University's “Game Changer Initiative↗️” uses UN SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals↗️) as a trigger to inspire students and staff into action. There is no mention of “enterprise” or “Entrepreneurship”. Not only do UN SDGs provide a call to action, but they also provide a common language (ie “impact”) between academic curricular and extracurricular entrepreneurial activities. Game Changer is a fast-paced, extra-curricular innovation program that uses ‘design thinking’ to find impact driven solutions to UN SDG challenges. Its purpose is to foster ingenuity, creativity, and innovative design to deliver environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable solutions. It began as an extra-curricular initiative run by the Student Enterprise Team and is now being embedded across core curriculum teaching at the request of academic staff. Students are inspired to get involved and, as a result, really enjoy the experience.

A common outcome is them asking “how can I have more impact?”, to which the reply is: “Maybe you might think about building a team, or raising funds…?” … suddenly the participants are behaving in an entrepreneurial manner…. Who knows here this might lead?

Ideas lead to enterprises

One of the key findings of The Scottish Tech Ecosystem Review (STER)↗️ published by Professor Mark Logan in 2020 is that the start-up stage of the overall ecosystem needs to be populated by many vibrant early-stage companies that - critically - are given the right levels of high-quality support. We therefore need to generate more “pre-startups” (which often originate from an idea). When discussing the funnel from ‘pre-start to unicorn’ STER notes:

Naturally, the funnel narrows from left to right – not all start-ups become scale-ups and not all scale-ups become unicorns, nor should they. So, there’s a minimum narrowing rate of the funnel that it’s impossible to improve upon. But, in most ecosystems, the rate of narrowing is much faster in practice than this natural rate. This is certainly true of Scotland’s ecosystem. The difference between these two rates is the opportunity available to us.

Startups and scale ups will be key to economic and social development in Scotland. Our National Strategy for Economic Transformation (NSET)↗️ (March 2022) outlines our aim

“to establish Scotland as a world-class entrepreneurial nation founded on a culture that encourages, promotes and celebrates entrepreneurial activity in every sector of our economy”.

We need to continue to “pump prime” the startup funnel with pre-startups, rapidly growing the number of founders entering the funnel (in terms of absolute numbers and diversity) and ensure that the funnel remains wide throughout its length. By doing this we will increase outputs of the funnel - whether that is in the development of more scale-ups and in turn, unicorns – or more “Scale-deeps” (positively impacting the communities that we inhabit).

All students come to university to learn. We need to meet them where they hang out (i.e., in the curriculum) and speak to them in a language they understand (i.e., idea generation and development, team building, setting up a business or side hustle, freelancing, co-founding, employability skills and/or other similar options for a career).

Speaking with a student at Imperial College London recently, he articulated that, typically, in any group of 10 students, you might have two that have “ideas” that might be evolve into a product or company, and maybe three or four who simply are not interested in entrepreneurial mindset development. It’s the four or five “in the middle” who either have not thought about it or have not considered it as an option who are the ones that we are interested in engaging with to help them explore their potential.

Enterprise in the curriculum could also help resolve the challenge of student engagement

The Covid 19 Pandemic had a significant impact on the student body and is the subject of several papers, each presenting their resulting recommendations (eg QAA Student Engagement Guidelines - May 2023↗️)

Many of the recommendations point to the benefits of encouraging students to engage with collaborative learning and teaching, working with other students in groups or teams to resolve problems and create joint solutions.

Enterprise development is not a spectator sport. Hands on work and achieving results is one of the tenets of an entrepreneur (Bill Aulet, MIT)↗️. Enterprise in the curriculum therefore presents us with the opportunity to enhance the student experience and potentially address some of the issues we have inherited post-Pandemic. The approaches outlined in this blog series and the 5 take-aways from the ‘Embedding enterprise in the curriculum’ series are great examples of how we might do support staff in achieving this.

Entrepreneurship is a “craft” as opposed to a science or an art (Bill Aulet, MIT)↗️ and therefore requires some learning of the basic concepts in classroom settings but also opportunities to learn by doing. The craft analogy also then opens doors to viewing entrepreneurship as a profession like medicine and architecture. Learning by doing is critical. Indeed, the more times a person engages with an entrepreneurial venture more likely they are to succeed (Prof Ed Roberts, MIT)

Summary: The potential of our universities to build on their current successes and have even greater impact on the region they inhabit (and beyond) is clear. We should also recognise the benefit to students in developing capacities that will lead them to a broader set of career options and positive destinations.

None of the above is easy. We see emerging support for this change across various institutions in Scotland. The work that Edinburgh Innovations are doing to research and develop this capability is exemplary as outlined in this blog series and newsletter. We see other great examples in other universities such as SRUC’s SEEDABLE Project↗️. We must take a strong leadership stance across our institutions and drive this change from the top to ensure that it delivers the potential outlined above.

I look forward to following the success of these and other similar programs across Scotland and beyond.

About Ross: Professor Ross Tuffee is a tech entrepreneur, author and government advisor. Ross focuses on developing entrepreneurial ecosystems, and coaching and supporting start-up and scale-up businesses. He has a passion for inspiring young people to consider a career in technology and entrepreneurship, encouraging the development and teaching of both in our schools, colleges, and universities. He is the co-author of the Scottish Government’s Policy Paper “The Entrepreneurial Campus” launched in June 2023, and is an Honorary Professor and Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Stirling.

Having graduated with a BSc in Geography from Durham University, Ross joined EY Management Consulting in London, eventually moving to Scotland in 1997 to work for Diageo, the global drinks giant. In 2009, he left corporate life and set up his own tech start up - Dogfish Mobile - just after Apple first launched their iPhone. He grew Dogfish to 40 people, exiting in 2018.

In addition to the above, Ross works with charities that focus on skills development, as well as supporting founders and business leaders to develop technology strategies and solutions that deliver positive outcomes. When he is not working, he can be found in the mountains of Scotland either walking or riding his motorbike!