Open 2013

An increasing number of programs are being developed to promote entrepreneurship skills among undergraduates. Often emphasis is placed on the necessary content, and course sequences are constructed to ensure that content is “covered” across the curriculum. But research on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education, as well as education in general, demonstrates that how teaching and learning occurs is as important as what is learned. In this paper, we offer such attention by exploring the integration of a dominant framework for business model development (Lean Launchpad) with frameworks for learning that emphasize the situated, social construction of knowledge; the role of mentors; and the need to work across disciplinary boundaries. By marrying business model development with intentional pedagogies grounded in Bruner’s spiral curriculum, Collins et al.’s framework for cognitive apprenticeship, and McNair et al.’s approach to interdisciplinarity in product development, we seek to enhance the development of technical innovation leaders.