1. Introduction
In the past decades, there has been a growing interest towards entrepreneurship education as part of academic discussion related to the ‘entrepreneurial university’ (e.g., [
1,
2]). While the policy makers consider entrepreneurial education to be a tool to support job creation and economic growth [
3], the education institutions, especially post-secondary level, have been busy developing a large range of entrepreneurship programs in practice [
4]. Subsequently, the range of offered educational opportunities have increased dramatically [
5,
6]. More recently, there have been significant changes in how universities train competences related to business skills and entrepreneurship in practice. Whereas the entrepreneurship courses offered as part of higher education study paths used to focus on the different forms of businesses and drafting business plans—with the idea that the main task for a new entrepreneur is to utilize the business plan in applying for funds for the start-up—the overall perception on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial competences has shifted from business ownership and stewardship towards providing students strong entrepreneurial competencies through more holistic educational approaches [
6,
7,
8,
9,
10].
There is some previous evidence that entrepreneurship programs can indeed be effective in reinforcing entrepreneurial interests among higher education students (e.g., [
8,
11,
12,
13]). However, the knowledge on the competences gained through entrepreneurship education is rather limited, and should be further investigated based on solid theoretical foundations (e.g., [
3,
14]). Instead of the volume of provided entrepreneurship courses, the focus of the research should be on ‘holistic’ and ‘integrated’ approaches toward entrepreneurship in both curriculum design and delivery, including exposure to role models, peer examples and applied learning [
15]. Moreover, as Fayolle and Linan [
16] state, the role of the university institutions and their operational (business) environment—the context—in supporting entrepreneurial behavior should be further studied as part of entrepreneurship education. This is also emphasized in the sense that societies, including education, must change in terms of sustainable development [
17]. For example, how do we produce new operating models and solutions for, e.g., climate change or pandemic prevention? This requires people to have the will and ability to think and act entrepreneurially. Therefore, traditional higher education programs and delivery methods need further consideration: What do we educate and how?
As an attempt to contribute to the rather limited theoretical discussion on entrepreneurship education [
3], this paper investigates team learning as a conceptual framework for supporting students’ entrepreneurial competencies within higher education institutions. More specifically, we explore the efficacy of the team learning method in entrepreneurship education as adapted in the case of entrepreneurship unit entitled ‘Proakatemia’ located in Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) in Finland. The team learning method is based on a holistic concept perceiving human being as the basis of education; instead of more traditional education delivery models, team learning builds on a strict requirement to support the students’ ownership of their own shared learning processes [
18], and the goals of the team enterprise in their study paths. The quantitative study collected from Proakatemia and non-Proakatemia students at the Tampere Higher Education Community builds on Seikkula-Leino’s & Salomaa’s [
19], and Ruskovaara et al.’s [
20] previous works.
Previously, Seikkula-Leino’s & Salomaa’s [
19] framework for entrepreneurial competencies has been used to assess entrepreneurial competencies of university staff members. The competence areas presented in the framework form the theoretical basis of our research. In this study, they are applied to the university student’s perception of the development of their entrepreneurial competencies, based on the idea of how these entrepreneurial competencies are reflected and strengthened in their thinking and everyday functions through team learning within the chosen case university. By utilizing this new framework in comparing the effects of a team learning approach on entrepreneurship education to the effects of other more individually oriented approaches in the university context, this study contributes to research on pedagogical and communal factors shaping the development of entrepreneurial competencies during university studies. Previous recent research has already pointed towards the importance of several features of the learning community that are present in entrepreneurial team learning, such as entrepreneurial culture that has been found to impact entrepreneurial intentions (mediated by entrepreneurial attitude) [
21], as well as psychological empowerment [
22] that has an impact on the students’ intrinsic motivation (e.g., [
23]) and knowledge sharing behavior. Typically, entrepreneurship education within universities has focused on entrepreneurial knowledge instead of becoming an owner of a team enterprise in a learning community. Entrepreneurial knowledge has been found to have an impact on the learners’ entrepreneurial intentions, but less so on their entrepreneurial mindset [
24].
The paper is structured as follows: first, the theoretical framework for assessing entrepreneurial competencies [
19] of higher education students is discussed in detail in the literature review together with the concept of team learning. Then, we introduce the chosen case study, and the selected methods, after which we present the main results from the survey followed by discussion, conclusion and limitations of the study. The results indicate that utilizing team learning is an effective way to foster the development of entrepreneurial competencies of higher education students. Finally, we elaborate on the theoretical and practical implications of the key findings, as well as suggesting further avenues for research.
3. Materials and Methods
3.1. Case Study Overview
The Finnish higher education landscape is based on a dual model consisting of research universities and universities of applied sciences as high-level vocational institutions. The Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) are especially active in collaborative RDI activities and they collaborate with a range of different stakeholders. The Finnish UASs are considered to be significant promoters of innovation, particularly through their strong business and work-life connections. As Seikkula-Leino and Salomaa [
19] observed, strong entrepreneurial competences of both staff and students would further strengthen the establishment of linkages with external partners and other collaborative initiatives.
The selected case unit Proakatemia is part of Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK), which is among the largest UASs in Finland. TAMK is a multidisciplinary higher education institution, and it provides many BA and MA degree programs, especially in health and wellbeing, business studies, and technology, and has over 13,000 students and ca. 800 staff members. TAMK has strong working life connections, and the management has committed towards becoming an entrepreneurial organization [
63]. TAMK’s mission statement emphasizes the importance of developing collaboration as well as the higher education’s societal role: ‘Our strong orientation towards working life ensures the best learning possibilities for our students. Furthermore, we are involved in research, development and innovation which specifically target the development needs of working life.’ In 2019, TAMK became a member of the newly established Tampere Higher Education Community, after the merger of the former University of Tampere and Tampere University of Technology in 2019. Currently, there are ca. 150 students and 12 team coaches in Proakatemia. Since being founded in 1999, Proakatemia students have started 46 team enterprises. During recent years, the overall turnover of companies operating in Proakatemia has been about EUR 1.2 million per year: For example, the community has also had a set goals for increasing the overall revenue of the team enterprises by 20% yearly from 2014 (EUR ~400,000) until 2019 (EUR ~1.2 million). However, not only business development is emphasized, but the students are encouraged to develop their literacy knowledge and reading competencies while focusing on the psychological wellbeing of the team entrepreneur students.
Daily work in TAMK Proakatemia is led by the board of leaders which consists of one team entrepreneur student from each team enterprise, the Head Coach of Proakatemia who is the only member of the teaching faculty in the board of leaders, and the Assistant Coach, a team entrepreneur student hired by TAMK to assist the coaches in managing the community and to work with the leaders of team enterprises, the Marketing and Communications Team, the International Team and the more recently formed Data Team. The strategic leadership roles of the Assistant Coach, as well as the leaders of the Marketing and Communications Team and the International Team have become more visible during the last few years. This has significantly helped to expand Proakatemia’s visibility and reach both in locally and internationally.
The main forums for dialogue in Proakatemia are training sessions where whole teams participate two times three to four hours each week and which are usually planned, led, and facilitated by the team entrepreneur students themselves. The training sessions usually focus on a theme or topic that the team entrepreneur students have identified as an important one. There is a formal curriculum in Proakatemia but rather than listing the required content and topics for teaching, it outlines the entrepreneurial team learning process (based on core values of Proakatemia) and the expected learning outcomes. This way, the control over content and topics to be learned remains almost entirely with the learning community, the team enterprises and the students themselves.
3.2. Research Design and Target Group
Previous studies imply that the development of entrepreneurship by entrepreneurship education is not straightforward in an academic education [
64,
65,
66], nor creating ‘real entrepreneurship’ [
67,
68]. Furthermore, there is no clear understanding of what kind of entrepreneurial competencies is needed to empower entrepreneurship by entrepreneurship education (e.g., [
69]). Reconfirming past reviews and meta-analyses, it has been seen that entrepreneurship education impact research still predominantly focuses on short-term and subjective outcome measures, and also tends to severely under describe the actual pedagogies being tested [
70].
These findings provided a profitable starting point for our study, allowing us to build on existing viewpoints related to entrepreneurial competencies in the context of higher education. Thus, we wanted to further investigate how different students studying in different entrepreneurial related courses or programs perceive entrepreneurialism within the TAMK university, and how these students perceive the development of their individual entrepreneurialism. It is also interesting to see how pedagogically successful entrepreneurship education programs, such as Proakatemia, supports the development of entrepreneurial competencies. All students in Proakatemia establish a company (registered as a co-operative) together with their peers, and about 40% of those students continue as entrepreneurs after their studies. Therefore, we compare how the entrepreneurial competencies have developed during university studies of students from different study programs. We have selected two groups for the comparison: (1) Proakatemia students (N 21) in their final years of their studies, and (2) non-Proakatemia students (N 43) coming from various disciplines, and having a slight interest towards entrepreneurship, since they attended a mini-course of entrepreneurship education called ‘Summer Challenge’, in May–June 2020. The collection of the data was implemented in May–June 2020 by two sets of SKILLOON assessment tools focusing on (1) the entrepreneurialism of university, and (2) the self-assessment of entrepreneurial competencies.
3.3. Research Questions and Assessment Tools
The research questions are following:
Overall, our study continues previous ‘entrepreneurial organization research’ implemented by SKILLOON (
www.skilloon.com, accessed on 10 December 2021), which is an official education concept of Education Finland supported by the Finnish National Board of Education. SKILLOON involves assessment tools of entrepreneurial activities and a mentoring program for learners. It is created in research cooperation with schools and universities, and it is used for education and research purposes. Thus, this study builds on a series of entrepreneurial organization research, which initially took place in August–May 2020. In the first part, entrepreneurial staff competencies were studied by using Seikkula-Leino’s theoretical approach as in this study, thus also applying SKILLOON assessment tools for university staff. In the first research setting, the staff assessment tools were analyzed to be reliable and valid, and the phenomenon has been examined through a multidisciplinary approach, and with a range of different assessment tools and two different respondent groups. In general, Cronbach’s alpha levels varied from 0.60 to 0.95. In addition, in our previous studies, the SKILLOON assessment tools have been successfully used in the corporate world (e.g., Wihuri Group, Property Management Association, Raisio, pharmacies etc.) between 2012–2015. These individual studies confirm the reliability of the assessment tools; as an example, Cronbach’s alpha levels varied in different categories between 0.67–0.96 [
19]. However, there is still room for further development of the assessment tools and research design for other target groups, which is our focus in this study.
The SKILLOON assessment tool, targeted to students, has two sets of different assessment tools, each of which included six sets of research questions. The first assessment tool contained an evaluation of the different (entrepreneurial characteristics) of the organization. The second assessment tool focused on self-assessment of the students. Each of these two assessment tools contained between five to seven claims. The respondents specified their level of agreement or disagreement on a symmetric agree/disagree scale between 1–10, where 1 meant that the respondent fully disagreed with the claim, and 10 that the respondent fully agreed. Each competence area forms an individual summation notation, by calculating each respondent’s mean for each set of questions. The tables below show examples of survey questions for evaluating the school (
Table 2) and self-evaluation (
Table 3).
3.4. The Analysis of the Data and Reliability
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to examine the differences between the means of different groups. The necessary assumptions concerning the normality and uniformity of deviations were appropriately addressed. After this, a suitable method (parametric vs. non-parametric) was chosen. The reliability of every assessment tool was examined by calculating the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients. Internal consistency of the assessment tools is measured with Cronbach’s alpha. All the alphas are either good or excellent (
Table 1), ranging from 0.63 to 0.90. The table below (
Table 4) shows the measurements for the consistency of the assessment tools by Cronbach’s alpha.
3.5. Generalization
TAMK provides an interesting case of HEI, as it has a strategic aim to strengthen entrepreneurial skills and competencies on an organizational level. Our current case study, as a second part of ‘entrepreneurial organization research’ targeted to students, together with the previous case study of staff, provides a suitable platform for investigating how these organizational goals can be detected in different individual members’, as staff’s and students’, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. According to Cohen, Manion, and Morrison [
71], the generalizability of single experiments, such as case and pilot studies, can be further extended through replication or multiple experiment strategies [
72]. This allows individual case studies to contribute to the development of a growing pool of data for eventually achieving a wider generalizability. Therefore, the results obtained from this study contribute to ‘analytic’ rather than ‘statistical’ generalization to build on further studies.
5. Discussion and Conclusions
The results indicate that the chosen case university has strong working life connections, and the management has committed towards becoming an entrepreneurial university. Our results are thus in line with our previous study, in which we investigated the entrepreneurial staff competencies at Tampere University of Applied Sciences (Seikkula-Leino & Salomaa 2020). It also suggests that the Proakatemia program is efficient in educating the students to become entrepreneurs, and to think and act entrepreneurially. Proakatemia has been running for over 15 years and the success of the program has been evident. In Proakatemia, all students establish their company, and about 40% of those students continue as an entrepreneur. Furthermore, the concept has been disseminated to Europe, Latin America and China. Even though Proakatemia evidence is “strong” in practice, we still have had concerns about its quality from the research point of view. Previous studies imply that the outcomes of entrepreneurship education are not straightforward [
64,
65,
66,
67,
68]. Furthermore, recent studies emphasize the need of studying used pedagogy in the field to understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurship education and learning (e.g., [
70]). Therefore, there was a definite need for our study; do we do “the right things’’ in Proakatemia entrepreneurship education (or do we only think so)? What kind of entrepreneurial competencies do we develop having team learning as our pedagogy? Then, how these Proakatemia students might differ compared to other students joining entrepreneurship education courses provided by Tampere Higher Education Community.
These questions provided a profitable starting point for our study, allowing us to build on existing viewpoints related to entrepreneurial competencies in the context of higher education. Thus, we wanted to further investigate how different students studying in different entrepreneurial related courses or programs perceive entrepreneurialism within the TAMK university, and how these students perceive their individual entrepreneurial competencies. Proakatemia curriculum and team learning method both allow the students high degree of freedom in following their own interests within the studies and enable them to dedicate time and effort on developing capabilities in the areas they feel they need to develop. The primary constraints or guiding factors in this, such as in most aspects of studies in Proakatemia, are the pressure coming from the team for each student to contribute to its success (often measured in terms of both, economic success and the development of the team and its members) and the Proakatemia curriculum which translates into personal study plan for each student. Students in Proakatemia are connected with working life organizations and entrepreneurs mainly through commercial projects where those organizations are their paying customers. This allows them to build real-life business relationships already during their studies. Proakatemia also has a very active alumni network of entrepreneurs and business professionals which provides events for dialogue and knowledge sharing, mentoring for current Proakatemia teams and individual students, as well as new business opportunities. The degree to which the current students utilize these structural affordances depends on the individual interests and personality.
Even though Proakatemia students’ entrepreneurial assessments are generally very positive, it is interesting to note that Proakatemia students’ individual assessments are lower compared to the other students. Given the nature of the degree program this somehow understandable; as previously described, at Proakatemia students have to challenge themselves genuinely as entrepreneurs in the business world. In this way, perhaps they do not share too idealistic perceptions of entrepreneurship change, and students look at themselves more critically. On the other hand, the added value of Proakatemia is highly evident in the results, demonstrated by the consistency in the way in which the students assessed the entrepreneurialism of the community. This is also highlighted in open collaboration measure that could reflect the open leadership structure of Proakatemia, as well as the intention of the coaches and the students to build and maintain a safe and collaborative environment. Proakatemia also has an explicit process for setting the renewed vision for the whole community every five years, and each year the coaches and the leadership team together select a specific development theme for the community.
These results are also in line with the yearly feedback from recent graduates collected on a national level also suggests that team learning model in Proakatemia provides a holistic learning environment where different elements that contribute to students’ personal growth are well-balanced [
60,
61], while some degree programs may attain higher marks from their graduates on some aspects of the learning process, guidance and the environment, Proakatemia gets consistently high marks on measured satisfaction on learning process guidance and the environment, including the use of process and peer feedback, which supports the utilization of team learning as a driver of entrepreneurial competencies.
This is evident in the survey results, which stress developing trust and respect in cooperation within teams. This reflects the values that are explicitly promoted by Proakatemia. As previously described, trust is promoted in the ‘value path’ of Proakatemia as the basic building block of entrepreneurial team learning, in which the community supports its development. These findings suggest that the Proakatemia concept could be utilized not only in the development of higher education curricula, but also in other levels of education, such as leadership training and continuous education. The various educational concepts of the Proakatemia are already being utilized internationally, such as “From Teacher to Coach Training”, in which traditional academic teacher role shifts towards a coach role enhancing team learning. However, further studies will be needed to validate the utilized conceptual framework of entrepreneurial learning
Based on these results, we conclude that the Proakatemia pedagogical concept facilitates the learning of the entrepreneurial competencies (e.g., [
19,
30,
31,
33,
36,
37,
38,
40]). Therefore, these results provide insights for universities aiming to develop their curricula, programs and pedagogy. However, we recommend further studies; for example, the conceptual framework used in this study and its evaluation could be approached from a qualitative point of view to increase knowledge on the effectivity of its’ adaptations in different educational contexts.
In conclusion, this study contributes to the development of theory-based framework of entrepreneurial competencies and their pedagogical operationalization within the context of higher education. As an implication for practice, we encourage to adapt Proakatemia pedagogy and further develop it, e.g., with the higher education’s own needs in mind. Furthermore, we have introduced novel assessment tools for higher education students’ entrepreneurial competencies by introducing a new framework for self-evaluation, which has previously been applied to assess the development of higher education staff’s entrepreneurial competencies. Overall, the research has increased our understanding of the development of entrepreneurial competencies, their realization, and their assessment and validation towards sustainable transformation within societies.
The results of the study also indicate the need for further comparative studies, including new students and recent graduates, as well as studies conducted using the framework with multicultural groups and in other cultural contexts.