Entrepreneurial Learning Process (ELP)

Applying entrepreneurship in graduate studies would be one of the key qualitative improvements in the field of management education. However, still very few Sri Lankan Universities have initiated specialized entrepreneurial courses or ELP within their degree programmes. There is still a big question about applying entrepreneurship in management education or youth empowerment and that is; why isn’t it applied widely across the universities and professional education field if entrepreneurial endeavors have created a world of sustainable innovations during the past two decades? Another alarming issue in absorbing graduates in to the private sector emerged repeatedly in Sri Lanka during the past decade. The private sector desperately pointed out the lack of appropriate life-skills is the common deficiency among today’s university graduates. These skills such as creativity and innovation, risk taking, communication, teamwork, marketing and leadership are critically requires to perform in the highly competitive and changing business environment. As a matter of fact entrepreneurship is the only subject where one can truly learn and practice such life-skills through a well designed Entrepreneurial Learning Process. Learning entrepreneurship without practicing, just for the sake of getting ahead of the exams does not motivate students in to possible ventures or may not sharpen their skills in a significant manner.

 
In order to design an effective entrepreneurial learning process (ELP), it may be worthwhile to understand the concept of entrepreneurship in a skill empowerment perspective and the key competencies within the entrepreneurship. It will help us to formulate a realistic scope for a successful entrepreneurial project for university students and sets a framework of possible outcomes (what skills would better off and to what extant) of such project.
Entrepreneurship?
The French economist most commonly credited with giving the term this particular meaning is Jean Baptiste Say who make an effort to put it in a different way giving a different definition to the one traditionally accepted in 19^th century and he praise entrepreneurship as the mechanism of creating economic value. He says “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield. Entrepreneurs create value.”  

However in the 20th century, the economist most closely associated with the term was Joseph Schumpeter. He described entrepreneurs as the innovators who drive the creative-destructive process of capitalism. In his words, “the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production.” They can do this in many ways: “by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.” Later Peter Drucker starts with Say’s definition, but amplifies it to focus on opportunity. Drucker does not require entrepreneurs to cause change, but sees them as exploiting the opportunities that change (in technology, consumer preferences, social norms, etc.) creates. He says, “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”

Putting the most vital aspects of above three definitions raised by Say, Schumpeter and Drucker, we can come in to a common idea of key aspects of a successful Entrepreneurial Learning Process (ELP).

Say                              Change agent or a creator of higher value on resources

Schumpeter                  Innovating new methods, products and technologies

Drucker                       Exploiting new opportunities

It may be appropriate to put these three aspects in to competency framework of entrepreneurship to elaborate more practical picture of how it looks like. Changing resources in to higher value products; innovating new things and methods and exploiting new opportunities seems to be the great impacts of entrepreneurship. So creating such impact, one needs to possess number of key skills generally known as entrepreneurial traits and obliviously there are very specific approaches to implant such skills in young graduates. Although there many traits pointed out by different scholars and institutions, it would be more appropriate to choose only the right combination of traits that goes with above three key aspects.

To be continued......