Using a New Venture Competition to Provide External Assessment of a University Entrepreneurship Program

Abstract

We use the framework of a university new venture competition to assess the learning of students who are entrepreneurship majors and minors. We conduct four iterations of a two-group experiment with a posttest. The treatment group consists of student teams competing in a new venture competition that have one or more students who are completing the requirements for a major or minor in entrepreneurship. The control group includes student teams competing in the competition that have no students who have completed the core requirements for a major or minor in entrepreneurship. We collected data in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. The results show that teams with entrepreneurship students most often score higher relative to objectives than teams without entrepreneurship students. We show how our findings help improve instruction and curricula in the program, and that those improvements have been measurable in subsequent competitions. In 2017, when we switched from a two-page written summary to a 3-minute video submission, the results were not as clean.