In search of entrepreneurial competencies: Peripheral vision and multidisciplinary inspiration

Abstract

This paper returns to the question of whether business schools alone can meet the challenges of enhancing creativity and innovation in entrepreneurial education. Policy makers have side-stepped definitional argumentation in order to embrace a more nuanced potential for entrepreneurial competency development, using multidisciplinary practice in learning and assessment that can be found beyond business and management discourse. Insights from other disciplines can be missed as different terminologies and definitions apply. Design education is inherently multidisciplinary and has been instrumental in facilitating significant policy-level changes. To delve more deeply into this phenomenon, the authors illustrate what actually happens in a classroom in which business and design intersect. Neuroscience research into the learning brain informs learning, teaching and assessment related to creativity, visioning and dealing with ambiguity – through the progressive development of flexibility and adaptability. The authors introduce the Crit, a common feature of Art and Design courses, as a tool of assessment, concluding that, before we dig deeper into business and management discourses, sideways glances into design education will continue to offer benefits.