Enabling Entrepreneurial Empowerment Through a Three-Day Entrepreneurship Camp

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of a 3-day entrepreneurship camp on nursing students’ empowerment to act entrepreneurially. Data were collected through individual semi-structured interviews with 17 nursing students conducted both before and after the camp. The data also included student drawings, as well as documents and interviews with 10 stakeholder representatives. Our findings show that students had very limited knowledge of entrepreneurship and had disregarded any valuable or natural link between nursing and entrepreneurship before entering the camp. The four changes in the empowerment process are as follows: (a) From ‘Entrepreneurship is not something nurses are supposed to do’ to ‘Nurses are potential actors in entrepreneurial processes’. (b) From ‘Observing problems in practice’ to ‘Nurses can shape healthcare’. (c) From ‘Not knowing how to define problems sufficiently small to act upon’ to ‘Knowing how to approach problem definition’. (d) From ‘Knowing little about the potential steps of realising a solution’ to ‘Knowing the first steps to testing a solution’s feasibility’. Our study provides insights into the meaning of empowerment to act entrepreneurially in the context of an entrepreneurship education for nursing students and has implications for the entrepreneurship education literature for non-business students.