Conceptual and Empirical Insights

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104 Spears School of Business, Stillwater, OK 74078. [email protected]. Journal of Small Business Management 2013 51(3), pp. 352–369 doi: 10.1111/jsbm.
Journal of Small Business Management 2013 51(3), pp. 352–369 doi: 10.1111/jsbm.12023

A Competency-Based Perspective on Entrepreneurship Education: Conceptual and Empirical Insights by Michael H. Morris, Justin W. Webb, Jun Fu, and Sujata Singhal

Competencies necessary for entrepreneurial action are investigated. Building on structuration theory, competencies are approached as an outgrowth of the learning of scripts deriving from interactions between the individual and environment. Managerial and entrepreneurial competencies are distinguished, with the latter helping to define the domain of entrepreneurship education. Employing a Delphi methodology, evidence is provided of a core set of 13 entrepreneurial competencies. Measures are then developed with a pilot study involving students in an international education program. Based on pre- and post-measures, findings demonstrate significant improvement on the competencies. Implications are drawn for the role of entrepreneurship education in competency development.

Introduction The essence of entrepreneurship is action (McMullen and Shepherd 2006). From a process perspective, an opportunity is recognized, a business concept is formulated, resources are identified and acquired, a venture is launched, adjustments are made, and the founder eventually exits. These actions must be accomplished in a context that has been characterized as ambiguous, uncertain, stressful, intense, lonely, volatile, exhilarating, and frustrating, among other descriptors (Krueger and Dickson 1994; Morris, Schindehutte, Kuratko and Spivack 2012). Arguably, the ability to launch and grow a sustainable enterprise under such conditions demands that an entrepreneur develop certain skills or capabilities. Although researchers have devoted considerable effort to identifying characteristics, traits,

values, affective states, and cognitive styles that are associated with entrepreneurial success (Baron 2008; Gartner 1989), the particular competencies that support venture creation remain elusive. Determining such competencies is further complicated by a failure among scholars to distinguish business skills from entrepreneurial skills. Both the academic literature and educational programs in entrepreneurship have tended to emphasize the need for competence at such general business functions as selling, producing, bookkeeping, supervising employees, coordinating logistics, arranging financing, and pricing, among others (Barringer and Ireland 2011). Although such skills are vital for the day-to-day operations of a business, they do not address the unique requirements of the entrepreneurial context. It is our contention that a distinct set of competencies are critical for entrepreneurial

Michael H. Morris is Professor and N. Malone Mitchell Chair in Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University. Justin W. Webb is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University. Jun Fu is a doctoral student in entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University. Sujata Singhal is a Researcher in Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University. Address correspondence to: Michael H. Morris, School of Entrepreneurship, Oklahoma State University, 104 Spears School of Business, Stillwater, OK 74078. [email protected]

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action, and that they must be developed in concert with more general business competencies (Rasmussen, Mosey, and Wright 2011). Consider, for example, the need for entrepreneurs to act upon opportunities in the environment (Shane and Venkataraman 2000). The opportunities in question are often unobvious, complex, multifaceted, and emergent (Eckhardt and Shane 2003; Webb et al. 2011). Accordingly, the abilities of the entrepreneur to recognize and accurately assess opportunities would seem paramount. As a second example, Stevenson and Jarillo (1990) argue that the essence of entrepreneurial behavior lies in pursuing opportunity regardless of resources controlled. The ability of an individual who has little to no resources to exploit a given opportunity would seem dependent on particular skills, such as knowing how to leverage resources at hand (Baker and Nelson 2005; Sirmon, Hitt, and Ireland 2007), bootstrapping (Winborg and Landstrom 2001), and guerrilla actions (Morris, Schindehutte, and LaForge 2002). Our purpose in this research is to develop further insights into the competencies that are most critical for entrepreneurial success. Progress in identifying, defining, and measuring key competencies has valuable implications for both the advancement of entrepreneurship education and improving entrepreneurial practice. Competencies directly correlate with job performance, can be measured against standards, and can be improved with training (Bryant and Poustie 2001; Klarus, Tillema, and Veenstra 1999). As a result, they can have significant implications for what is taught in entrepreneurship courses and training programs, how it is taught, and how learning outcomes are assessed. As a case in point, entrepreneurship courses that focus heavily on teaching business basics may be underemphasizing the development of critical capabilities in such areas as opportunity identification, risk mitigation, or resource leveraging. Further, the unique, action-based nature of entrepreneurship suggests that development of such competencies may require pedagogical approaches that move beyond traditional lecture, discussion, and exam formats. The research proceeds as follows. We first establish the theoretical and conceptual foundations for a competency-based approach. Building on structuration theory (Giddens 1984), we view entrepreneurship as a process that unfolds as individuals behave within and

interact with their environments. Environments provide scripts that guide individual behaviors and interactions, and education serves as an important source of scripts within the individual’s environment. Individuals adopt and/or revise scripts based on feedback and evaluation of their behavioral and interactional outcomes. Where scripts are successfully employed over time, they can become the foundation for the individual’s competencies. Based on this foundation, a research methodology is implemented in which we utilize a two-sample, three-round Delphi approach to identify key competencies critical for entrepreneurial performance. Following this, an approach to measuring these competencies is proposed and tested using samples of American and international students participating in an intense, six-week academic program undertaken in South Africa. Using pre- and postmeasures, evidence is provided of student improvement on most of these competencies.

The Nature of Competencies The notion of “competency” has received considerable attention in recent years across a diverse mix of fields and domains, including medicine and health sciences, human resource management, education, psychology, strategic management, and public policy, among others (e.g., Bergevoet and Van Woerkum 2006; Hartle 1995; Klein 1996; Shook et al. 2003). A competency refers to the knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and behaviors that people need to successfully perform a particular activity or task, such as rewiring a house or performing a surgical procedure (Brophy and Kiely 2002; Rankin 2004). Work in a range of disciplines has demonstrated that proficiency in particular competencies is associated with higher levels of performance or productivity (e.g., Hartle 1995; Hayton and Kelley 2006; Shook et al. 2003). Hence, Klein (1996) refers to observable behaviors that superior performers exhibit more consistently than average performers (Klein 1996). Others demonstrate that various competencies contribute differentially to overall performance of a given task (e.g., Leiba-O’Sullivan 1999). Implicit in these arguments is the notion that a given competency can be measured against some sort of standard. Yet standards do not always exist, and even where they do, the assessments are by definition subjective. The challenges of measurement have resulted in a

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range of assessment methodologies, each having advantages and disadvantages in a given context, such that the ability to produce valid and reliable indicators of one’s competence can be elusive (Bird 1995; Cogbill, O’Sullivan, and Clardy 2005). Although useful in bridging the gap between job requirements and a person’s knowledge and capabilities, competency remains a fuzzy concept (Boon and van der Klink, 2003). This fuzziness is tied to various factors, most notably the fact that the definition of a given competency is not universal (Hayton and Kelley 2006). Competence assessments are based on individuals, whereas the definition of the competence concept tries to include the context as well. As such, there can be considerable diversity in how a competence is defined depending upon who is being assessed, who is doing the assessing, and the context in which the competence is being applied (Luken 2004). Researchers have attempted to distinguish “stable” and “dynamic” competencies (LeibaO’Sullivan 1999; Tannenbaum and Yukl 1992). Stable competencies, such as natural ability and emotional stability, are relatively fixed and may constrain one’s potential to develop a skill. Dynamic competencies are those that can be acquired and developed, such as self-efficacy, knowledge on a particular topic, or stress management skills. Importantly, the implication for dynamic competencies is that they are subject to learning and developmental processes and can be improved with training and practice (Bergevoet and Van Woerkum, 2006; Bryant and Poustie 2001). Similarly, competencies are enhanced with practice, and can decline over time without sufficient practice. Ongoing experiential development of a competency is critical for ensuring one’s capabilities allow for flexibility in adapting to diverse and changing organizational demands (Garman and Johnson 2006). Such flexibility is an important component of a competency.

Competencies in Entrepreneurship It is well established in the literature that the entrepreneur/founder is one of a number of key factors that determine the performance of new ventures (Chawla, Pullig, and Alexander 1997; Horne et al. 1992; Stoner 1987). An emphasis on competencies as a means of capturing key aspects of the entrepreneur that impact venture performance is a relatively new

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development, rooted in early work by Boyatzis (1982) on managerial competencies that impact performance of larger firms. Bird (1995) endorses the application of the competency approach in an entrepreneurial context, concluding that competency can represent both a baseline standard for planning and launching a venture and a higher standard for achieving sustainability and growth. Others have stressed that different competencies are necessary for venture success at different stages in their life cycles (Colombo and Grilli 2005; Rasmussen, Mosey, and Wright 2011). Importantly, work on competencies is quite distinct from early research on entrepreneurial traits and more recent work on cognitive styles. The former area, though controversial and inconclusive, has attempted to associate traits such as the individual’s need for achievement, tolerance of ambiguity, risk propensity, and locus of control with entrepreneurial success (Gorman, Hanlon, and King 1997; Morris 1998). The latter area emphasizes the roles of such variables as information processing, counterfactual thinking, cognitive biases, and attributional style (Baron 1998). Competencies may be influenced by both traits and cognition, but transcend each in that they represent observable and measurable knowledge, behaviors, attitudes, and skills that are instrumental in task performance and that can be developed (Bird 1995; Man, Lau, and Chan 2002). At the same time, little consensus exists regarding the relative importance of particular competencies in an entrepreneurial context. Emphasis has been placed on social skills such as interpersonal relations, communications, social adaptability (Hood and Young 1993; Vesper and McMullan 1988); functional business skills such as marketing and sales, finance and cash management, strategic planning, and accounting (Freel 1999; Hofer and Charan 1984; Smith and Morse 2005); general managerial skills such as goal setting, planning, organizing and motivating people, coordination of work, allocation of resources, leadership and delegation (Chandler and Jansen 1992; Colombo and Grilli 2005; Orser and Riding 2003); and entrepreneurial skills such as opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation (Chandler and Hanks 1994; McMullan and Long 1990; Mitchelmore and Rowley 2010). Of these, arguably the greatest emphasis has been placed on functional business and general management skills, with the

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least insight provided on entrepreneurial skills. Scholars have proposed competency taxonomies, such as Winterton’s (2002) distinction between cognitive (e.g., knowledge acquisition), functional (e.g., budgeting), personal (e.g., communicating or acting ethically), and meta competencies (e.g., ability to learn to cope with uncertainty). Man, Lau, and Chan (2002) argue for six major competency areas, which they term opportunity recognition and development, relationship building, conceptualizing, organizing, strategy formation, and personal commitment. Although reflecting a synthesis of the literature, to date no empirical evidence has been provided to validate these categorizations. The simplest and perhaps most promising distinction would appear to be between entrepreneurial and managerial competencies. Support for such a distinction has been provided by Chandler and Jansen (1992), Chandler and Hanks (1994), Hood and Young (1993), and Lerner and Almor (2002). Yet no comprehensive set of entrepreneurial competencies has emerged from this distinction, with the set of competencies typically limited to three or four items. A recent example can be found in the work of Rasmussen, Mosey, and Wright (2011), who examine case studies of technology commercialization within a university environment. They identify three competencies: opportunity refinement, resource leveraging, and championing. However, little insight on how to measure these competencies is provided. Further, the general tendency is to associate the entrepreneurial category with start-up and the managerial category with achieving growth, though it would seem both are needed to successfully establish and grow a business.

Developing Competencies: Theoretical Underpinnings Penrose (1959) suggests that entrepreneurial ability is a distinct resource to be considered in the resource bundle that produces a sustainable enterprise. But how does this ability develop? A useful lens can be found in structuration theory, which concerns the reciprocal interactions between individuals and their environments (Giddens 1984). Environments provide structure to individuals’ behaviors and interactions, yet the structure results from individuals’ past behaviors and interactions. These past developments facilitate learning about the types of

behaviors that lead to desirable outcomes, thereby establishing values, norms, and rules for future behavior (Barley and Tolbert 1997). Such behaviors and interactions can take various forms, including general experiences, experiences specific to unique circumstances, knowledge gained through education and practice, family guidance, and mentoring, among others. Values, norms, and rules conferred by the environment are essentially scripts defining how to behave within specific contexts. Individuals acquire a broad cache of scripts from behaving in different situations, each of which is available to guide them through a situation with which they are familiar (Feldman and Pentland 2003; Lord and Kernan 1987). Through their own subsequent, idiosyncratic behaviors and interactions, individuals determine whether these scripts should be replicated or revised for future circumstances. To the extent that the scripts lead to desired outcomes, individuals are likely to replicate the scripts; if following scripts leads to unexpected or undesired outcomes, they may revise or replace scripts (Aldrich 1999). As scripts are confirmed, they can serve as the foundation for the development of competencies, a development which generally occurs over time (Nelson and Winter 1982). Although scripts serve to define how individuals should behave within specific contexts, they are absorbed from various sources and, because of this, may conflict in certain cases. Further, one’s own experiences in leveraging the scripts across different contexts might lead to varying outcomes. Therefore, the individuals do not necessarily fully internalize or “retain” the scripts when first enacting the scripts (Giddens 1984). Only through a complex array of interactions between individuals and others with whom they interact can the individuals gather feedback, evaluate the efficacy of the scripts, and confirm whether the scripts lead to desirable outcomes (Salvato 2009). Through greater use of a given script, individuals gain expertise, understanding the specific contexts in which the script is effective and how the script may be leveraged in concert with other scripts, among other important nuanced understandings. Over time, through significant experience with the scripts and interactions with others, the individuals can retain scripts, which have now become competencies. Work on structuration within entrepreneurship emphasizes the recursiveness of an entre-

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preneur’s interactions with the environment (Chiasson and Saunders 2007; Sarason, Dean, and Dillard 2006). For example, the entrepreneur draws upon various situational cues, such as prospective customers’ opinions of products, knowledge of technological or sociocultural trends, and trade industry reports, to arrive at an understanding of opportunities (Kaish and Gilad 1991). The entrepreneur’s existing scripts guide activities in accessing these sources of information, informing them regarding what information is important, with whom they should talk, how to establish new ties, and other activities. In exploiting the opportunity, the entrepreneur can establish new market expectations (Eckhardt and Shane 2003), or scripts within the broader environment, thereby creating new values, norms, and rules for customers, competitors, and other stakeholders. Simultaneously, they receive feedback from the environment that can further confirm or contradict their own scripts. As they evolve their scripts, entrepreneurs alter their behaviors and potentially create new market expectations yet again. This reciprocal interaction between entrepreneurs and their environments continues until the entrepreneurs settle on a given set of scripts or terminate their venture activities (perhaps because they have failed to understand and/or effectively employ their scripts). Specific entrepreneurship-oriented scripts remain unspecified and understudied. The emergence, rapid growth, and development of entrepreneurship programs suggest, however, that entrepreneurship represents a unique discipline encompassing a distinct body of scripts that can be imparted to students. Entrepreneurship education is an important channel through which students, as prospective entrepreneurs, can learn scripts to guide their present and/or future entrepreneurial pursuits. Despite the growth and development of entrepreneurship as a discipline, how entrepreneurship is taught continues to share significant overlap with broader business disciplines. A cursory examination of entrepreneurship majors and leading entrepreneurship textbooks finds students learning general business fundamentals, such as introductory accounting, marketing, finance, and management principles, raising the question of whether entrepreneurship education is providing students with the scripts needed to be effective entrepreneurs. There is a need, then, to better specify the nature of competencies that is unique to entre-

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preneurial action in a start-up context. In the following section, we describe a research study conducted to distinguish entrepreneurial from managerial competencies, and attempt to isolate and then measure the entrepreneurial competencies.

Identifying the Relevant Competencies We first implemented a multiround Delphi technique to construct a core list of entrepreneurial competencies. The Delphi technique is a highly formalized method of soliciting ideas and subsequently gaining consensus among individuals considered to be experts in the field of interest (Chan et al. 2001; Preble 1983). A particular benefit of this method is its ability to garner multiple expert opinions without faceto-face interaction among the experts (Wilson, Averis, and Walsh 2003). Instead, interaction is facilitated after an initial survey is distributed to individuals from a chosen panel(s) of experts; in our case, we ask the participants to list entrepreneurial competencies. Based on the results, a group of raters collate all of the ideas and in subsequent rounds panelists then get the chance to see and respond to the ideas of other panel members. The study involved two distinct samples, a panel composed of 20 distinguished entrepreneurs and the other composed of 20 leading entrepreneurship educators. For our practitioner panel, we chose a set of 20 entrepreneurs who had successfully founded a venture and had grown the business to include 100 or more employees. They represented a range of industries and included technology, manufacturing, and service companies. Those chosen from academia were seasoned full professors of entrepreneurship with at least 10 years of experience teaching entrepreneurship courses and publishing scholarly work within the field. Each had received recognition for their achievements as an entrepreneurship educator. The purpose of the study was explained as determining success factors in venture creation, and both groups agreed to participate through multiple rounds. In Round One, members of each panel were sent an initial survey asking whether they believe there are specific competencies associated with entrepreneurial success, and if they were learnable. Respondents were asked to generate a complete list of entrepreneurial competencies they believed were vital in

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launching a venture, with a particular focus on distinguishing entrepreneurial versus managerial competencies. A managerial competency is one that is more generic, applying to all managers or managerial contexts, whereas an entrepreneurial competency is one that is unique to and critical for the creation of a new venture. A total of 265 items were generated. The compilation included a number of items that appeared to be similar, and others that required more interpretation. Accordingly, we collated the responses and asked four raters (two doctoral students and two entrepreneurship professors) to break down the list into a common set of competencies. Each rater produced a revised list of competencies that ranged from 17 to 30 items. We then took any items on which at least three of the four raters agreed. This resulted in a set of 18 competencies. Round Two involved designing a second survey around the 18 competency items from the first round. It was explained that the revised set was the result of the combined inputs from the two panels. Respondents on each panel were then asked to rate on a scale from 1 to 7 (1 = an unimportant competency, 7 = an important competency, and 4 = neutral), the relative importance of each competency for success in venture creation. They were also asked to indicate the extent to which each of the competencies was more an entrepreneurial or general management competency, where 1 = more a managerial competency, 7 = more an entrepreneurial competency. The data from Round Two were analyzed to determine those items that received a mean importance rating of 4.0 or better and that were rated as being more an entrepreneurial than a general management competency. Based on the results, a new list of 14 competencies was produced. This revised list was sent to the members of the two panels. We then repeated the steps from the second round using the revised list, asking respondents to again assess the importance and entrepreneurial/managerial nature of each competency. Using the same selection criteria, a set of 13 competencies was produced from this third round (see Table 1). Lastly, these 13 competencies were again sent to the panelists, asking if these were indeed the key entrepreneurial competencies or if there were any they would remove. There was a consensus around this final set.

It is noteworthy that this set of competencies, although more detailed and comprehensive than that found in previous work, is consistent with the areas emphasized across earlier studies (i.e., Chandler and Hanks 1994; Lerner and Almor, 2002; Man, Lau and Chan, 2002; Mitchelmore and Rowley, 2010; Rasmussen, Mosey and Wright, 2011).

Developing and Testing Competency Measures To develop further insights on the use of these competencies in an educational context, an attempt was made to develop a set of measures which could be employed to assess progress in mastering a given competency. The intent was to develop self-report measures of the 13 competencies that could be applied before and after exposure to some sort of formalized entrepreneurial training or experience. A questionnaire was developed consisting of 141 items. Where possible, existing scales or subscales were adopted, with original scales developed for three of the competencies. The scale development process is summarized in Table 2, including the source of the scale, number of items, sample items, and published reliability scores, where available. For the measures of 11 of the competencies, five-point Likert-type response scales were provided (strongly agree–strongly disagree). The measures of building and using networks employed a five-point scale capturing the frequency of reliance on a number of networkingrelated activities (quite frequently–not at all). Seven of the items assessing resource leveraging utilized a response scale capturing the degree to which one was comfortable in his/her ability to engage in various leveraging activities (very comfortable–not at all comfortable). To test the scales, a pilot study was conducted using students involved in a rigorous experiential engagement that unfolded over a number of months. Our objective was to assess the competencies in a context where subjects had few distractions, their efforts were focused on entrepreneurial activity, and they had to meet challenging performance standards. Moreover, we sought a learning context that had characteristics associated with entrepreneurial behavior, such as stress, uncertainty, ambiguity, and the need for hard work. For these reasons, a unique study abroad program was chosen where students work with historically

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Table 1 Entrepreneurial Competencies Identified from Delphi Study 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

Opportunity Recognition: the capacity to perceive changed conditions or overlooked possibilities in the environment that represent potential sources of profit or return to a venture Opportunity Assessment: ability to evaluate the content structure of opportunities to accurately determine their relative attractiveness Risk Management/Mitigation: the taking of actions that reduce the probability of a risk occurring or reduce the potential impact if the risk were to occur Conveying a Compelling Vision: the ability to conceive an image of a future organizational state and to articulate that image in a manner that empowers followers to enact it Tenacity/Perseverance: ability to sustain goal-directed action and energy when confronting difficulties and obstacles that impede goal achievement Creative Problem Solving/Imaginativeness: the ability to relate previously unrelated objects or variables to produce novel and appropriate or useful outcomes Resource Leveraging: skills at accessing resources one does not necessarily own or control to accomplish personal ends Guerrilla Skills: the capacity to take advantage of one’s surroundings, employ unconventional, low-cost tactics not recognized by others, and do more with less Value Creation: capabilities of developing new products, services, and/or business models that generate revenues exceeding their costs and produce sufficient user benefits to bring about a fair return Maintain Focus yet Adapt: ability to balance an emphasis on goal achievement and the strategic direction of the organization while addressing the need to identify and pursue actions to improve the fit between an organization and developments in the external environment Resilience: ability to cope with stresses and disturbances such that one remains well, recovers, or even thrives in the face of adversity Self-Efficacy: ability to maintain a sense of self-confidence regarding one’s ability to accomplish a particular task or attain a level of performance Building and Using Networks: social interaction skills that enable an individual to establish, develop. and maintain sets of relationships with others who assist them in advancing their work or career

disadvantaged entrepreneurs for six weeks in the impoverished townships surrounding Cape Town, South Africa. Twenty-five U.S. students were joined by 15 South African students in a program that provides hands-on consulting support to entrepreneurs that have been in business for one to two years, are struggling to survive, but are committed to the venture. Following a three-month online precourse that involved exposure to the social, economic, religious, cultural, and historical context, students traveled to South Africa and were based on a local campus located near the townships. They worked in teams of four, with each team assigned to two entrepreneurs. Teams were coached by four U.S. and South African faculty members, with

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classroom sessions in the mornings and fieldwork in the afternoons and evenings. No mention of the competencies was explicitly made in the classroom sessions, as the content emphasized how to engage and assist the clients, with modules addressing consulting approaches in the different functional areas of the venture. Students spent extensive time in the ventures and interacting with clients, suppliers, competitors, and resource providers. Each team had to assess the venture, establish priorities, and produce a minimum of eight deliverables, four for each of their assigned clients. A deliverable was defined as a problem within the venture that was solved by the teams. Reflecting the intensity and high expectations of the program, the teams actually aver-

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9 11 18

Resilience

Self-efficacy

Building and Using Networks

Note: NA = Not Applicable.

6

15

Ability to Focus yet Adapt

Value Creation through Innovation

2

15

Resource Leveraging

Guerrilla Skills

12

8

Conveying a Compelling Vision

Creative Problem-Solving

9

Risk Management/Mitigation

21

5

Opportunity Assessment

Tenacity

10

No. of Items

Opportunity Recognition

Competency

Forret and Dougherty (2001)

Hodgkinson (1992)

Sinclair and Wallston (2004)

Haynie and Shepherd (2009)

Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen (2008)

Duckworth and Quinn (2009); Hmieleski and Corbett (2006) Hmieleski and Corbett (2006) and Zampetakis and Moustakis (2006) Winborg and Landstrom, 2001; Politis, Winborg and Dahlstrand (2011) Developed by the authors

Developed by the authors

Developed by the authors

Entrepreneurial alertness scale (Tang, Kacmar, and Busenitz 2010)

Entrepreneurial alertness scale (Tang, Kacmar, and Busenitz 2010)

Source

I often make novel connections and perceive new relationships between various pieces of information. I can distinguish between profitable opportunities and not so profitable opportunities. When facing multiple opportunities, I am able to select the good ones I am more of a risk avoider than a risk manager. I find it difficult to get others committed to my vision or dreams. I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one. I am creative when asked to work with limited resources. There is always a way to obtain a resource even if you cannot afford it. I could quickly identify three guerilla ideas to help a start-up venture. New business ideas often come to me when directly observing how people interact with products and services. I tend to look for the right answer, rather than realize there might be multiple ways to get to an end result. I believe that I can grow in positive ways by dealing with difficult situations. I can shape whatever environment in which I find myself operating. I often attend social functions for purposes of building professional relationships.

Sample Items

Table 2 Summary of the Measures Employed to Assess Competencies

0.65 to 0.79

0.82

0.64 to 0.76

0.74

0.74 and 0.78

NA

0.68 to 0.73

0.89

0.70 and 0.73 to 0.83

NA

NA

0.83

0.71 and 0.91

Reliability in Previous Research

aged 13 deliverables across their two clients. Sample deliverables included designing and implementing bookkeeping systems, helping to generate sales, working with vendors to lower procurement costs, enhancing operational processes and flows, acquiring signage or equipment, modifying prices, and working with the entrepreneurs to prepare tenders and loan applications. Yet to accomplish such tasks, they had to engage in activities associated with the competencies, such as recognizing new opportunities in the marketplace, finding ways to leverage resources, and demonstrating resilience as their ideas were rejected or proved unworkable. Each student completed the original 141item survey prior to the start of the program, and again after program completion. Initial analysis was performed to assess scale properties. For the competencies employing established measures where multiple subscales are involved, a series of factor analyses were run to validate the scales. For the adapted scales, in all but one case the results were consistent with those found by the original scale developers. Specifically, with “opportunity recognition,” two factors were generated, scanning/search and association/connection. Subsequent reliability analysis on these two subscales produced alpha scores of 0.79 and 0.87, respectively, both of which exceed Nunnally’s (1978) criterion (see Table 3). “Tenacity/ perseverance” produced three subscales. Two of these (consistency of interest and perseverance of effort) were consistent with the original work of Duckworth and Quinn (2009), whereas the items from Hmieleski and Corbett (2006) produced one subscale, which we labeled action orientation and persistence. Reliability scores were 0.83, 0.95, and 0.73, respectively. With “creative problem-solving,” the factor analysis of the original single scale provided by Hmieleski and Corbett (2006) was confirmed with seven items capturing producing creative solutions, whereas the other items produced a second subscale labeled serve as creative role model, with reliability scores of 0.96 and 0.80, respectively. Consistent with Politis, Winborg, and Dahlstrand (2011), the “leveraging/ bootstrapping” measures resulted in three subscales, and these reflected creative approaches to leveraging, new uses of resources, and using other people’s resources. Reliabilities for these subscales were 0.85, 0.86, and 0.76. The

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“innovation/value creation” measures produced three subscales labeled experimentation, observing customer usage, and challenge the status quo. Alpha scores for the scales were 0.89, 0.76, and 0.90. The assessment of “resilience” resulted in two subscales, which Sinclair and Wallston (2004) call resilience coping and effective use of social support, with reliabilities of 0.84 and 0.91. The items for “building networks” resulted in three subscales with eight items, labeled maintain contacts, participate in community events, and engage in professional activities, with reliabilities of 0.87, 0.97, and 0.87. The measurement of “risk management/ mitigation” employed scales developed by the authors. The factor analysis identified three factors explaining 62 percent of the variance. These subscales were labeled risk understanding (two items), risk management (two items), and risk avoidance (two items), with reliabilities of 0.83, 0.71, and 0.62. Factor analyses on the remaining measures produced single-factor scales, as expected. These included a threeitem scale for “opportunity assessment” (coefficient alpha = 0.94); a three-item scale for “conveying a compelling vision” (coefficient alpha = 0.67); two items measuring “guerrilla skills” (coefficient alpha = 0.75); six items assessing “ability to maintain focus yet adapt” (coefficient alpha = 0.88); and four items measuring “self-efficacy” (coefficient alpha = 0.89). Based on a final set of 78 items, mean scores were calculated for each of the 13 competencies using the data from the administration of the survey before and after the program. Table 4 summarizes these results. Positive improvements were observed for all 13 competencies. t-Tests were then run to determine if the improvements were statistically significant. The differences between pretest and posttest mean scores were significant for nine of the entrepreneurial competency scales at the 0.05 significance level (see Table 4). These included opportunity recognition, risk management/mitigation, tenacity/ perseverance, creative problem solving, resource leveraging/bootstrapping, guerrilla skills, value creation/innovation, resilience, and networking skills. The results were consistent across the sample of students, with no differences in terms of the improvement on the competencies based on student major (business versus nonbusiness), enrollment status (undergraduate versus graduate), or

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Table 3 Reliabilities for the 13 Competency Scales Competency

No. of items

Reliability (Cronbach’s Alpha)

4 2 3

0.794 0.867 0.943

2 2 2

0.826 0.713 0.615

3

0.673

6 2 2

0.828 0.951 0.730

7 2

0.968 0.803

4 3 2 2

0.854 0.863 0.759 0.752

2 2 3 6

0.898 0.761 0.904 0.878

2 3 4

0.914 0.841 0.895

4 2 2

0.867 0.973 0.867

Opportunity recognition Scanning/Search Association/Connection Opportunity Assessment Risk Management/Mitigation Risk Understanding Risk Management Risk Avoidance Conveying a Compelling Vision/Seeing the Future Tenacity/Perseverance Consistency of Interest Perseverance of Effort Persistence in Action Creative Problem Solving Producing Creative Solutions Serving a Creative Role Model Resource Leveraging/Bootstrapping Creative Approach to Leveraging New Uses of Resources Using Resources of Others Guerrilla Skills Value Creation with New Products, Services, Business Models Experimentation Observing Customer Usage Challenge Status Quo Ability to Maintain Focus Yet Adapt Resilience Resilience Coping Use of Social Support Self-Efficacy Building and Using Networks Maintain Contacts Participate in Community Events Engage in Professional Activities

country of origin (United States versus South Africa). These results lend initial support to the hypothesis that competencies can be enhanced based on exposure to an entrepreneurship program, in this case one that was centered both on the classroom and intense experiential learning. When placed in a context that centers

on experiencing and performing real tasks that support entrepreneurial outcomes, students appear to get better at demonstrating specific competencies. For the nonsignificant results, it may be that the particular competencies remained stable in spite of the activity, or the tasks required of the students did not influence development of these particular competencies.

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Table 4 Results for Pre- and Posttest Differences Competency

Opportunity Recognition Opportunity Assessment Risk Management/Mitigation Conveying a Compelling Vision/Seeing the Future Tenacity/Perseverance Creative Problem Solving Resource Leveraging/Bootstrapping Guerrilla Skills Value Creation with New Products, Services, Business Models Ability to Maintain Focus Yet Adapt Resilience Self-Efficacy Building and Using Networks

Pretest x

Posttest x

T-statistic

Significance

4.02 3.33 3.92 3.65

4.13 3.48 4.18 3.79

7.21 1.40 10.35 2.29

.0003* .197 .0007* .074

3.43 3.58 3.05 3.00 3.50

3.63 4.02 3.61 3.90 3.93

3.27 11.35 6.6 42.97 5.52

.005* .0001* .0001* .007* .0007*

3.24 3.72 3.58 2.95

3.32 4.12 3.82 3.29

1.19 6.53 1.14 6.52

.143 .001* .168 .0002*

*Significance < .05.

Discussion The purposes of this research have been to determine competencies that are core to the entrepreneurship discipline and provide measures for examining the extent to which these competencies can be developed through education. Despite the increasing prevalence of entrepreneurship education programs in universities throughout the world, significant variance remains in the content across these programs and how this content is taught, with many programs continuing to emphasize more general business competencies over specific entrepreneurial competencies (Hills 1988; Solomon, Duffy, and Tarabishy 2002). We undertook a Delphi study to identify more clearly what competencies are unique to the entrepreneurial context and should be integrated into the curriculum. Further, the proposed measurement approach may be especially relevant given the growing scrutiny by accrediting bodies and other stakeholders on assessment of outcomes within educational institutions. Our Delphi study identified 13 competencies unique to the entrepreneurship discipline. Our findings point to behavioral competencies, such as opportunity recognition, opportunity

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assessment, resource leveraging, and developing business models, as well as attitudinal competencies, including resilience, self-efficacy, and tenacity. These unique competencies can help to define the content of entrepreneurship education programs going forward. Moreover, the various forms of competencies that we identify in this study highlight the complexity of entrepreneurial action and, congruent with the calls of other scholars (Cope 2003; Higgins and Elliot 2011), suggest a need for a stronger emphasis on experiential learning in education programs. This point is further reinforced by the degree to which the competencies demonstrate strong, positive intercorrelations. Research evidence suggests that entrepreneurship education can produce a range of desired outcomes, from increased entrepreneurial intentions to students becoming selfemployed to students starting growth-oriented businesses (Dickson, Solomon, and Weaver 2008; Hamidi, Wennberg, and Berglund 2008; Wilson, Kickul, and Marlino 2007). Although we also hope that education serves as a platform for transforming students into entrepreneurs, we believe that a more desirable outcome should be the transformation of students into successful entrepreneurs that embody key entrepreneurial competencies.

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Although educational programs can produce entrepreneurial intentions, it is less clear whether entrepreneurship education in its current form increases perceived behavioral control within this context (Fayolle, Gailly, and Lassas-Clerc 2006). Creating successful entrepreneurs requires a shift from studying intentions and business formation alone to actually studying successful business development and growth as desired outcomes of education. To support such a shift, in addition to identifying idiosyncratic entrepreneurial competencies, we have sought to provide scholars with measures to determine competency development. We utilized a key experiential learning task in which students consulted with micro-entrepreneurs in an impoverished setting to demonstrate the measurement efficacy of these scales in a learning context. To provide a basis for our research and with the aim of providing a theoretical foundation for entrepreneurship education research going forward, we integrated competence research with structuration theory. A key assertion underlying our study is that competencies are developed (rather than bestowed) over time. Education can play an important role in the development process by providing the key building blocks or scripts (i.e., norms, values, and rules guiding desirable behaviors) and constructing experiences through which students can employ these scripts, gain feedback, confirm or disconfirm their assumptions and understandings, and mold their attitudes and behaviors into competencies. Structuration theory provides a lens through which to understand competency development by establishing a framework that captures the recursive process and explains how scripts develop into competencies and the factors that can facilitate or impede this development. Structuration research has distinguished among three broad categories of scripts: signification, legitimation, and domination (Giddens 1984). Signification scripts influence how individuals search for environmental change, legitimation scripts influence how individuals interpret and evaluate this change, and domination scripts influence how individuals respond to this change (Giddens 1984). Interestingly, our study identifies particular competencies that fall within each of these categories. For example, we found signification scripts in the form of opportunity recognition and visionbased competencies, which are key tasks

associated with searching for environmental change. Supporting the development of these competencies, professors might have students perform entrepreneur interviews to understand how established entrepreneurs recognized their own opportunities, which in turn might lead to the development of signification scripts in the form of reading trade journals, staying abreast of industry trends, and establishing industry mentors. Similarly, opportunity assessment and creative problem-solving competencies are supported by legitimation scripts, in which students might be taught about and tasked with developing business models/plans or feasibility analyses. Finally, domination scripts support the development of resource leveraging, value creation, or guerrilla marketing skills through which entrepreneurs respond in tangible ways to their environments. To convey these domination scripts to students, professors may employ elevator pitches, business plan presentations, or construct mock entrepreneurial tasks or simulations. Importantly, by conveying these different scripts, professors provide students with the building blocks for what to expect in and how to respond to their entrepreneurial experiences. Entrepreneurs can identify, interpret, and then respond to environmental change in the process of recognizing and exploiting opportunities (Chiasson and Saunders 2007). In doing so, however, the environment of stakeholders can then respond to the entrepreneurs’ own actions, providing feedback that may lead entrepreneurs to either confirm or adjust their scripts. The uncertainty of the entrepreneurship context can create ambiguity and stress regarding whether opportunities were really identified, the solution created to address the opportunity was effective, or the routines through which the entrepreneurs mobilized resources appropriately addressed market needs. Of note, our findings identifying tenacity, resilience, and self-efficacy as attitudinal competencies would seem to have implications for how signification, legitimation, and domination scripts are taught. In this regard, professors might construct tasks that are extremely difficult for students to perform, which can then introduce intentional failures that provide the professors with opportunities for teaching the students how to respond to these setbacks, how to diagnose what caused the setbacks, and ultimately about the need to persevere to reach lofty goals.

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We have identified a set of competencies upon which educators can focus in developing pedagogical approaches within entrepreneurship education. Scholars can provide students with the appropriate scripts that can serve as the foundation for the development of these competencies and subsequently draw upon the measurement tools highlighted herein to determine their teaching effectiveness. It should be noted that this research has identified general entrepreneurship competencies, yet research has recently shown that entrepreneurship is manifested differently across contexts (e.g., in for-profit versus nonprofit environments, or within domestic markets versus across particular international borders, or at the new venture level versus the institutional level) (Morris, Webb, and Franklin 2011). Although some scripts may be relevant across contexts, such as the scripts that guide entrepreneurs’ opportunity recognition, entrepreneurs may need to develop entirely new scripts for certain contexts. For example, entrepreneurs in the nonprofit context often rely on a certain level of donations as funding to support their organizational activities. Seeking to scale their benefits across broader markets or to address a broader set of needs, these entrepreneurs may need to develop specific scripts to support how they interact with stakeholders to generate donations while resolving conflicts that may surface because these stakeholders do not wholly agree with the direction of the nonprofit (Morris, Webb, and Franklin 2011). Research has also indicated that individual differences lead to variation in how a student is influenced by entrepreneurship education (Dickson, Solomon, and Weaver 2008; Wilson, Kickul, and Marlino 2007). For example, Wilson, Kickul, and Marlino (2007) find that an entrepreneurial concentration in an MBA program can increase entrepreneurial selfefficacy more for women than men, which in turn can increase entrepreneurial intentions (Boyd and Vozikis 1994; Krueger and Carsrud 1993). Entrepreneurship education could help women overcome gender stereotypes that classify entrepreneurship as a more masculine career option (Gupta, Turban, and Bhawe 2008). Whether caused by gender, race, or cultural biases/differences, the presence of individual differences suggests that the scripts that professors convey and how they convey these

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scripts might need to be adapted to effectively influence a breadth of individuals. One key objective of entrepreneurship education has been to create general awareness of what entrepreneurship entails (Hills 1988; Solomon, Duffy, and Tarabishy 2002). As the objective of entrepreneurship education increasingly translates into creating actual entrepreneurs (Solomon 2007), we believe our research presents a foundation for guiding the development of entrepreneurship curricula. Courses can be tailored to developing specific competencies within students, such as where theory is integrated with experiential learning to not only provide scripts but also allow students to leverage those scripts in meaningful ways. We foresee a standardization of scripts and experiential learning exercises across entrepreneurship programs as a fruitful goal for the discipline going forward. Although we have proposed one approach for attempting to assess student progress on development of competencies, others certainly exist and need further development. As examples, a faculty member might give students an entrepreneurial scenario at the end of a semester or program and require them to describe what opportunities they can identify, or how they would go about mitigating risks in that scenario, and this is then rated by the instructor. Yet another approach might find the instructor relying on external evaluators, such as entrepreneurs and investors who listen to students present venture concepts and, following a discussion with the student, rate them on how well they appear to have mastered particular competencies. Students could also be encouraged to maintain a competency log, where they record competency-related actions over a semester. Each time they identify an opportunity, leverage a resource, or engage in some guerrilla action, they would capture it in the log. A number of limitations should be kept in mind when interpreting our results and conclusions. In the Delphi study, in addition to practitioners, we drew upon a group of wellestablished scholars to identify and narrow down a specific set of entrepreneurial competencies. To the extent that these scholars draw upon the same core sets of entrepreneurshiprelated theories to guide their cognitive mindsets, they might have overlooked key entrepreneurial competencies that would have been identified if employing other theories. As

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a second limitation, we tested the efficacy of the measurement scales following an intensive, albeit single entrepreneurial task. We do not expect that all experiential learning tasks will lead to development of all competencies. Instead, we encourage scholars to pursue work linking development of particular competencies to a range of different teaching pedagogies. Further, the reliance upon self-report measures raises the potential for subjective biases in judging one’s abilities, especially where instructors emphasize the importance of competencies throughout a course. Finally, it should be noted that our study focuses on entrepreneurship competencies in general. We fully expect that more specific competencies might be relevant within social entrepreneurship (i.e., balancing commercial and social objectives), corporate entrepreneurship (i.e., politicking), international entrepreneurship (i.e., understanding cultural and institutional nuances), and other contexts.

2005), it would seem such legitimacy hinges on defining the unique body of knowledge that entrepreneurship scholars study and convey to students. We have integrated competency research and structuration theory to address this gap by identifying competencies that are unique to the entrepreneurship discipline, and by identifying and developing scales that enable entrepreneurship scholars to measure the effectiveness of their education programs. In doing so, we provide a foundation for scholars to construct educational programs that more accurately deliver scripts through which students develop attitudinal and behavioral competencies to support their entrepreneurial endeavours. We hope our study (1) stimulates future research examining the role of entrepreneurship education in supporting students’ structuration of key competencies, and (2) informs the development of effective entrepreneurship programs.

Conclusion

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