Teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship Building on the Singapore Experiment

This book draws on a teaching experiment at Nanyang Technological University to show how we can teach innovation and entrepreneurship.

Is it possible to teach someone to be an entrepreneur? Is innovation something that can be assessed and taught in a classroom? Teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship answers these and other questions by focusing on a teaching experiment in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, wherein classes of English-speaking Singaporeans and Mandarin-speaking students from the People's Republic of China were subjected to an 'entrepreneurial eco-system'. Extending from the west coast of the USA to Singapore and Shanghai, this programme subjects students to a wide range of activities, including a four-month business simulation game where teams of students select their favourite inventions and pitch them to real venture capitalists with the inventors present. Drawing on the lessons learned from this highly successful experiment, the book argues that not only is it possible to describe the innovative process, we can also teach it, measure it, evaluate it and model it.

List of grids; List of dilemmas; Acknowledgements; Introduction: a headlong assault upon the inexpressible?; 1. Singapore's challenge; 2. The entrepreneurial ecosystem: a programme like no other; 3. How can innovative pedagogies be measured?; 4. Co-defining innovative education: how the instrument was created; 5. The Singapore results; 6. Results of the Mandarin speaking programme; 7. Reconciling values: a helical model of innovative processes; 8. 'It is only the Hawthorne effect'; 9. The programme that cannot stand still; 10. Innovation and the future of the university; 11. What are the implications of being able to teach innovation?; 12. Is a new creative class arising?; Bibliography; Index.

Is innovation something that can be taught? There are many reasons to be sceptical about the practicalities of teaching innovation but this book shows that, not only is it possible to describe the innovative process, we can also teach it, measure it, evaluate it and model it.

Charles Hampden-Turner is Associate Fellow at the Institute of Marketing in the School of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University. He is also co-founder and Director of Research and Development at the Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner Group, Amsterdam. Professor Hampden-Turner has been the recipient of many awards and is the author of eighteen books, including best-sellers such as Riding the Waves of Culture (1993) and The Seven Cultures of Capitalism (1993), both co-authored with Fons Trompenaars.