Start-Up Sprint: Providing a Small Group Learning Experience in a Large Group Setting

Abstract

Entrepreneurial education should reflect the real-world entrepreneurial process by providing for experiential learning. The challenge is reconciling this with the resource constraints that lead to large class settings, even in specialized postgraduate programs. This article offers practical suggestions for creating a highly interactive event as part of a largely lecture-based module. Students participate in a full-day Start-Up Sprint that uses real-world entrepreneurship tools and mimics the intense experience of a start-up event. This experiential exercise is designed to provide students in a large class with the experience and benefits of small group teaching, through a hands-on problem-based learning exercise that is supported by mentoring and live feedback. It provides entrepreneurship teachers of large classes with a way to mitigate the constraints of large classes, faculty time, and physical infrastructure and offer students a meaningful learning experience.

Bibliometric Systematic Literature Review of Problem-Based Learning Entrepreneurship

“…It emphasizes positive learning among students and potential entrepreneurs [85], partly through cooperative efforts within the community, for instance, by municipality and industry cooperation [86,87] or between the university, industry and government [88], in where the integration of PBL fosters self-directed and collaborative learning and improves problem-solving skills [16]. Moreover, interdisciplinary learning is inherent to PBL, for instance in the full-day 'Start-Up Sprint' to emulates a start-up event [89], and singular case studies that enable students to approach real world problems [90,91].…”

Teaching Perspectives on Experiential Learning in Large Classes

“…The first issue (Clancy et al, 2021) focused on contributions which addressed student engagement with experiential learning in large classes. It showcased a variety of contributions which variously examined how student engagement in large classes can be enhanced through increasing participant diversity (Donovan & Hood, 2021), inviting industry experts to collaborate with faculty on assessment (Lyons & Buckley, 2021), designing unique events that mirror the intensity of an entrepreneurial start-up (Hilliard, 2021) or using multiple sources of feedback that could improve learning outcomes (Black et al, 2021). Other articles demonstrated how the very nature of classes with larger student enrolments could facilitate opportunities for experiential learning that are not replicable in smaller classes (Memar et al, 2021;Page et al, 2021).…”