Browsing by Author "Tuominen, Marika"

Entrepreneurship education has been a part of the national curriculum since the 1990s, but attitudes tend to be hostile and the inclusion of objectives in teaching are yet to be developed further. Previous studies show that clear definitions and common practices are needed to support entrepreneurship education in practice. The concepts of entrepreneurship and education are ambiguous making the definition of entrepreneurship education challenging. This study examines the student’s role and the achievement of entrepreneurship education objectives in the co-creation process from the teachers’ and the company representatives’ perspective. The co-creation projects were part of the DIT-Heureka and 6AIKA EduDigi projects aimed at developing a continuous operating model that supports innovations and entrepreneurship education. The aim of this study is to find out how co-creation projects can be utilised to meet the broad entrepreneurship education goals in schools. The data was collected by a semi-structured thematic interview of six teachers and 11 company representatives from seven companies. All of the interviewees had taken part in a co-creation project. Four of the interviews were conducted as pair interviews and the rest as individual interviews. The interviews were analyzed following the principles of thematic analysis.  The teachers and company representatives emphasised the student’s role as a learner, influencer, experiencer and future builder. In addition, the role was seen as an innovator, interactor, and producer of benefits. The achieved objectives of entrepreneurship education were divided between experiences, knowledge, skills and attitudes. The co-creation process gave the students an experience of working with external stakeholders, as well as a different learning environment and versatile ways of working. Overall, the experience strengthened the students’ self-esteem. They learned about entrepreneurship, working life and opportunities of entrepreneurship. Co-creating improved the students’ co-operation, interaction, emotional and self-direction skills. The project succeeded in creating positive attitude towards work and entrepreneurship, and in motivating the students. Experiences of creating value play a key role in assuring the objectives of entrepreneurship education are broadly met. In addition these experiences support the development of both internal and external entrepreneurship within the co-operation projects.