A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Panayiotis Ketikidis et al.
can be infused to students. Finally, this paper presents a successful case of teaching
entrepreneurship in postgraduate higher education (PGHE): the MSc in Business Management and
Technology. The specific programme is offered by The University of Sheffield International Faculty,
CITY College (will be referred to as CITY College) which is located in Thessaloniki, Greece, and is
delivered internationally, in Tirana (Albania) and in Sofia (Bulgaria) under an innovative delivery
model – The Flying Faculty. The paper is structured as follows: section two presents an overview on
entrepreneurship education from different perspectives, the need for inter-disciplinary
entrepreneurship in PGHE and several case studies identified in the literature. Section three presents
an overview of CITY College and a detailed description of the MSc in BMT programme. Section four
discusses the mechanisms for the effective education provision, the flying faculty delivery model and
quality assurance procedures. In section five, we present and discuss students’ feedback and
perceptions and finally, we summarize our discussion in the last section.
2. Entrepreneurship in non-business higher education
2.1 Entrepreneurship education overview
Defining entrepreneurship can take several directions depending on various viewpoints. From a
methodological point of view, entrepreneurship can be defined as the process of discovering,
exploring and creating opportunities through implementing change when launching innovative ideas in
an uncertain/risky and lately, international environment (McDougall & Oviatt, 2000). From another
point of view, the Socrates report of the European Commission (Socrates, 2006) defines
entrepreneurship as “the mindset and the process needed to create and develop economic activity by
blending risk taking, creativity and innovation with sound management within a new or existing
organization”. Nevertheless, the Schumpeterian view of entrepreneurship – of creating and dealing
with new and innovative combinations of factors of production and ways of doing things, still provides
a high level overview on the existing trends (Gibb et al., 2009). Finally, according to (Luczkiw, 2007 &
Gibb, 2006), the essence of entrepreneurship lies in opportunism, timeliness, ability to get into a
market space and flexibility to bind around customer’s needs. All these aspects must be incorporated
in the entrepreneurship education curriculum in order to provide a thorough knowledge base of all the
aspects that are involved in triggering entrepreneurial actions. Furthermore, entrepreneurship
education differentiates from general business studies. According to (EC, 2008; Gibbs, 2005; Boyle,
2007 and Kuratko, 2005) the main features of entrepreneurship education are the promotion of
creativity, innovation and self-employment. More specifically, when teaching entrepreneurship at the
higher education level, the European Commission (EC, 2008) recommends that the ultimate goal of
this process must be to develop entrepreneurial capacities and mindsets through: developing
entrepreneurial drive (awareness and motivation), training students in business start-up, management
and growth, and finally, though developing entrepreneurial abilities to identify and exploit
opportunities. In spite of the existence of these clear policies and directions on the goals of delivering
entrepreneurship studies in higher education, the literature heavily debates on the adequacy of the
academic programmes in which entrepreneurship education is being delivered. More specifically, the
current debate on the existing gap is whether entrepreneurship should be taught in non-business
programmes rather than on traditional business course (Gibbs, 2005).
2.2 Entrepreneurship in non-business postgraduate studies
A possible answer to the gap described in the previous section is presented by the European
Commission (EC, 2008) which differentiates the following two types of entrepreneurship education:
entrepreneurship within business schools and economic studies (which focuses on venture startup/creation
and business management and growth) and entrepreneurship within science and
technology studies (which focuses on management skills, marketing and commercialization of
technology based ideas, patenting and protecting the technological concepts/innovations and on
financing and internationalizing the high-tech ventures). According to (Hamouda et al., 2009, Brand et
al., 2006 and Sandercock, 2001), even though most entrepreneurship programmes are still in the
main business courses, this trend decreases and the number of inter-disciplinary entrepreneurial
programmes is increasing. One of the reasons for this changing trend is described by (Brand et al.,
2006) which debates that entrepreneurship studies suit better non-business students since having a
different background, one can have improved strengths and a better grasp of the offered
product/service. Moreover, in order to identify the best ways of delivering entrepreneurship education
in post graduate courses, (Hamouda et al., 2009) mentions the following activities: in curricular (guest
speakers/lecturers, academic/partial modules, project work with/without interdisciplinary focus,
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