Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education

Introduction

This book is a compilation of practical insights for entrepreneurship and innovation (E&I) education based on tools, techniques and frameworks I have developed or adopted in my 20-year career as a teacher. As most of this experience took place in France, my country of adoption, the book is biased towards a European perspective of this phenomenon. However, its applicability is by no means restricted to this continent – it could be adopted anywhere in the world.

Why write another book about entrepreneurship and innovation education? As mentioned above, this book is focused on creating a “toolbox” of frameworks for analyzing entrepreneurship and innovation problems and making decisions. Like my previous books (Lima and Fabiani 2014, 2016), this one assumes that the human brain cannot articulate more than three or four dimensions of a problem without the aid of what might be called “checklists for thinking”: frameworks (visual or otherwise) that help students think in terms of multiple variables affecting a problem. A typical example of a very valuable tool for thinking about business creation is the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (2010). It suggests nine building blocks to think about how value is created, delivered and captured throughout the process. Before this framework was proposed, students of entrepreneurship and innovation tended to focus either on the value creation or on the value delivery process, or neglected to contemplate ...