Games in Entrepreneurship Education to Support the Crafting of an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Abstract

An increasing number of education institutions, including many universities and colleges, are offering entrepreneurship education. This development is driven by the hope that more entrepreneurs could be “created” through such efforts, and that these entrepreneurs through their newly founded ventures will contribute to economic growth and job creation. At higher education institutions, the majority of entrepreneurship courses rely on writing business plans as a main pedagogical tool for enhancing the students’ entrepreneurial capabilities. In this chapter, the authors argue instead for the need for a pedagogy that focuses on supporting students in crafting an entrepreneurial mindset as the basis for venturing activities. They discuss the potential role of games in such entrepreneurship education and present the example of an entrepreneurship game from the Swedish context, which was developed by a group of young female entrepreneurs. The authors describe the game and discuss their experiences of playing it with a group of novice entrepreneurship and management students at the master’s level, and they review the effectiveness of the game in terms of how it supports students in crafting an entrepreneurial mindset. The authors conclude the chapter by outlining how entrepreneurship games could be integrated into a university curriculum and suggest some directions for future research.