Annemarie Ridder

Raising awareness of entrepreneurship and e-commerce: a case study on student-entrepreneurship

In this article, we describe a competition to write a business plan for an e-commerce application for an organisation. The competition was open for students at all levels of education, although only students and alumni of the university participated. Five organisations were recruited for participation in the competition called e-Match. For each organisation, a team was formed consisting of three to five students and one or more representatives of senior management. A third party coached the teams via three workshops (on idea generation, idea selection and idea elaboration). Each team prepared a business plan and entered it for the competition. The business plan had to be prepared within two months. The best plan was rewarded with a prize. For the participating students, the competition was an excellent opportunity to put their knowledge and skills to work and to win a prize with it. For the companies, it was an opportunity to explore the area of e-commerce and develop an edge over the competition. There is also an opportunity for the region, since the competition promoted innovation through e-commerce. For the university, a competition like this one is an opportunity to raise awareness of entrepreneurship among students.

Entrepreneurship Education in Context: A Case Study of the University of Twente

The University of Twente is an entrepreneurial university; this means more than just having a focus on entrepreneurship, but in the framework of this paper we restrict ourselves to this (for a more elaborate discussion on the entrepreneurial university we refer to Shane 2004; Clark 1998; Bok 2003). Entrepreneurship is an essential and consistent element in the university policy since the early 1980s and concerns infrastructure, spin-offs, teaching and research. In this paper we first give an overview of the context and how it evolved in Twente, then we focus on the teaching programme and we close with some remarks.

Students exploring and experiencing innovation in an entrepreneurship programme

In this paper, we describe the results of a course within the curriculum of the Minor Entrepreneurship programme of the University of Twente. The course Entrepreneurship in SMEs (EiS) focused on a more in-depth study of innovation, company growth and growth models, and networks and cooperation. In 2003, students in this course put their knowledge, skills and creativity to the test in a real-life consultancy assignment. Four locally established organisations were interested to act as project initiators. All were looking for opportunities for market and/or product diversification. The students had to form teams, choose an assignment and prepare a planning. The end product had to be an analysis of the problem and advice on actions or improvements. Ten teams did the assignment. In this paper, the results are discussed in the frame of the characteristics of the assignment and team dynamics. In the final section, we discuss implications for entrepreneurship education.