<p>Ongoing efforts seek to develop
engineering students into entrepreneurially minded engineers. Often, work to
achieve that goal relies on theories drawn from entrepreneurship research from
business disciplines to develop interventions and ground research on engineering
entrepreneurship education. However, despite repeated warnings by multiple scholars,
there has been limited evaluation of whether such theories are appropriate to
design interventions or understand the development of students’ entrepreneurial
expertise. Theories of entrepreneurship developed in the field of
entrepreneurship typically make several assumptions or research design choices
pertinent to their usefulness in education. Those assumptions include assuming
those studied make no errors, building expert-comparative rather than
expert-novice theories, and mythicizing and reifying certain types of
entrepreneurs. One such theory, the <i>Theory
of Effectuation</i>, is representative of these assumptions as well as being
commonly used in entrepreneurship education as a model of correct decision-making.
Prior studies have used the Theory of Effectuation to compare experts and
students and track students’ growth, but have presumed error free reasoning by
both experts and students.</p>
<p>My dissertation focuses on
empirically evaluating the appropriateness of one assumption from the Theory of
Effectuation when applying the theory to engineering students’ decision-making.
The assumption I focus on is what errors engineering students make when working
on typical early stage entrepreneurship decisions. The existence of such errors
would call into question whether the Theory of Effectuation, which does not
allow for such errors, can usefully describe engineering students’
decision-making. Interpreting the resulting errors can also help educators
inform educators about pre-existing knowledge and beliefs that students bring
to entrepreneurship classrooms. This can enable the design of more effective
research studies and interventions to improve the state of the field</p>
<p>To do so, I completed a verbal
protocol study with engineering students at two universities. The verbal
protocol used is based on one previously used to develop the Theory of
Effectuation and asks participants to think aloud while making decisions
typical of an early-stage entrepreneurial venture. I then coded the transcribed
data from those protocols for conceptual errors related to business and
management concepts. A thematic analysis of the results showed several
consistent patterns of errors. Those included misinterpreting market research
data as representative of their company’s financial performance, misunderstanding
and using faulty analogies to analyze different outside investment options, and
perceiving that they would personally receive all proceeds from a company’s
sale. In general, two overarching patterns emerged – overestimating the value
of their venture and overestimating their control.</p>
<p>I end by interpreting the results
through three existing areas of literature to provide new knowledge to
engineering entrepreneurship educators. First, the patterns of errors appear
similar to other misconceptions in that a potential alternative ontology that
students rely on may exist in mythicization work, however more evidence is
necessary to formally establish that the patterns of errors are in fact
ontological miscategorizations. Second, the patterns of errors are strikingly
similar to the myths about entrepreneurs that have been identified in media and
research that reports on entrepreneurs. This suggests a specific source of
students’ preconceptions about entrepreneurship that educators should actively
engage with. Third, the findings validate existing theoretical critiques of how
entrepreneurship theory is used in engineering education. Specifically,
theories developed in entrepreneurship literature appear to be a poor fit for
engineering education research because of their embedded assumptions.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/17145701 |
| Date | 19 December 2021 |
| Creators | Todd Mathew Fernandez (11812037) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Patterns_of_Errors_in_Engineering_Students_Entrepreneurial_Decision-Making/17145701 |
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