Out of the blue: using flashmob as an effectual pedagogy for creating opportunities

Questions we care about (Objectives)

Entrepreneurship education traditionally focuses on teaching theories of entrepreneurship and new venture creation from a functional perspective, with learning outcomes based on individualist conceptualisations of entrepreneurship, which further separate the entrepreneur from opportunities and ventures. Alternative perspectives of entrepreneurship view this a process in which entrepreneurs actively co-create opportunities through a social learning process based on experience. We therefore ask: How might structured opportunities to learn through experience be developed for students? What theoretical understandings of entrepreneurship might provide ways for students to question their own frames of thinking and appraise their doing in real social contexts? How might social acting and learning be simulated in formal education programmes?

Prior work

Viewing entrepreneurship and opportunities as a contextualised social process of co-creation creates new questions for entrepreneurship education. In order to explore these issues in the context of entrepreneurship, we consider social theories of entrepreneurship, including concepts of disclosive spaces (Spinosa et al, 1997), effectuation and entrepreneurship as method (Sarasvathy, 2011) and how these may be applied to pedagogy through experiential learning and entrepreneurial learning in social contexts..

We consider the impact that the above approaches may have on student’s approaches to learning and their understanding of entrepreneurship, as it may be assumed that as pre-entrepreneurs used to traditional educational approaches, students may usually apply causal logics, which may or may not be disrupted through entrepreneurship education.. In order to explore this, we outline how one technique, enterprise flashmobs, may be utilised as a form of simulated experiential entrepreneurship education through which students may question their own frames of reference and appraise their own experiences in specific social contexts. We outline three instances of enterprise flashmobs at universities in the United Kingdom and Denmark. We then analyse: (i) video recordings of these flashmobs; and, (ii) subsequent reflective diaries in which students appraise their learning in relation to social theories of entrepreneurship.

Implications, Value and Originality

Using enterprise flashmobs as a way to enhance self-efficacy and promote effectuation is a gentle way to encourage students to act entrepreneurially. Contrary to other methods of teaching through entrepreneurship, which ask students to actually start a business, flashmobs simulate some of the activities that the entrepreneur has to undertake allowing them to focus on specific entrepreneurial issues without starting a venture. Thus, the paper is of value to educators supporting new ways to evaluate how learning activities may directly contribute to students’ learning through personal experience and their development of an entrepreneurial approach to situations. It is original in that it combines concepts of experiential education and entrepreneurial learning with social theories of entrepreneurial process to provide new ways to support student learning which acknowledge entrepreneurship as a social process.

Key words: Entrepreneurship Education as Method; Effectuation; Disclosive Spaces; Experiential Learning; Flashmobs