The allure of successful tech startups is evident; a majority of 16-25-year-olds want to be entrepreneurs, reveal recent surveys by Samsung and Santander. At Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), students learn through a “fail fast” process where more than 90 per cent of ideas are rejected but a small number become household names. An inclusive alternative supports students’ entrepreneurial learning by empowering them to gain skills through freelance work, self-employment or starting a microbusiness or social enterprise.
To be inclusive, supporting students to build skills is not enough. Approximately 58 per cent of the University of Westminster’s home undergraduates come from communities lacking the cultural and material capital to benefit from extracurricular enterprise programmes. For these students, conventional “one-size-fits-all” entrepreneurship education often feels out of reach and disconnected from their realities.
A tailored, scalable model of entrepreneurship education
To respond to this challenge, the University of Westminster has developed a model that operates at scale while offering tailored support to our diverse population of 20,000 students. The Westminster Enterprise Network (WeNetwork), comprising students, colleagues, alumni and external partners, has been key to implementing this strategy. As the network grows, so does our potential to demystify and contextualise entrepreneurship for all our students. This improves our ability to deliver inclusive and curriculum-embedded entrepreneurship education at scale.
For institutions wanting to create a similar network, partnering with an alumni relations team is vital for identifying entrepreneurial alumni who can share their experiences and make the concept of entrepreneurship more relatable to students.
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Removing barriers to access
Traditional university enterprise programmes often depend on extracurricular activities, inadvertently excluding students with work or family responsibilities. An inclusive approach requires that we reduce the practical barriers to entrepreneurship. A prime example of this is our Elevate incubator, which offers £10,000 of in-programme funding specifically for microbusinesses. This is crucial support for students looking to establish themselves in self-employment or small-scale entrepreneurship.
This inclusive approach has already yielded results: 80 per cent of participants in recent enterprise programmes were from under-represented communities. This impact contributed to WeNetwork winning the Engaging Alumni Networks to Demystify Enterprise award at the 2023 National Enterprise Educator Awards.
Providing financial support to enable inclusivity requires external resources. Higher education institutions will need support from a strong fundraising and development team that is able to build relationships with alumni and corporate partners committed to widening access to entrepreneurship.
Embedding entrepreneurship into curricula
To be a truly entrepreneurial university, we need to make enterprise education an integral part of every student’s experience. This means adapting entrepreneurship to the differing disciplines and contexts that our students inhabit. “Enterprise” takes on unique forms relevant to their specific fields of study. To overcome this challenge, we have started embedding discipline-specific entrepreneurial pathways within the curriculum. Underlining this approach to scaling enterprise education has been the commitment and significant investment of the university executive board, most recently evidenced in Zone29, a new, purpose-built facility in central London designed to foster innovation at scale.
To achieve this “embedding” approach will require changes across the whole institution. This can begin with facilitating collaboration between enterprise, careers and alumni teams to offer an integrated service that supports academic colleagues to deliver entrepreneurship as part of a range of effective work-based learning options in their curricula. For example, the delivery of workshops by alumni with discipline-specific experience and expertise helps students understand how they can take entrepreneurial action as an alternative to, or alongside, traditional career options within their field or areas of interest.
The success of an entrepreneurial university is not defined by the number or value of its start-ups but by how many students feel empowered to take entrepreneurial action throughout their lives. In creating the Westminster Enterprise Network, we are building relationships we hope will continue to deepen and enrich our students’ learning as they apply entrepreneurial skills and thinking to their careers and communities throughout their lives.
Paul Dwyer is a professor of creative enterprise at the University of Westminster.
The University of Westminster is shortlisted for Outstanding Entrepreneurial University at the Times Higher Education Awards 2024 #THEAwards. A full list of shortlisted candidates can be found here.
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