Student Case Development Based on Entrepreneurial Experiences: A Guide for Entrepreneurship Educators

Photo by Chase Chappell on Unsplash

By Even Haug Larsen & Karoline Kaspersen, both Assistant Professors at NTNU

We explore how entrepreneurship educators can guide students in developing cases based on their own entrepreneurial experiences to encourage reflection and create meaningful learning opportunities. This approach exemplifies student-directed pedagogy, where learning stems directly from students’ experiences—a concept gaining traction among entrepreneurship educators. When implemented effectively, this method helps students cultivate skills in creative and critical thinking, information literacy, analysis, problem-solving, and communication.

About the Article

The article is based on Chapter 9: Student case development based on entrepreneurial experiences: a guide for entrepreneurship educators, from the book REFRAMING THE CASE METHOD IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION.

It provides a theoretical foundation, presents a how-to guide of the method, and discusses how various activities can enhance the approach. While the described example focuses on graduate students developing cases about their start-ups, the method is adaptable to different contexts. Educators can modify assignment parameters, such as deliverables (case study, teaching note, essay, or presentation), grading criteria, length, student organization (individual, paired, or group work), and the type of entrepreneurial activity for reflection. Entrepreneurial experiences extend beyond start-up ventures and may include idea generation, experimentation, market research, business planning, or pitching. Educators control the process by adjusting assignments to fit the context and learning objectives, with the key requirement being that students have concrete entrepreneurial experience and ideally some familiarity with the case-based method.

The idea of student-driven case development is not new. Similar approaches have been applied in various disciplines, such as natural sciences, nursing, finance, and management and organizational behavior. This guide focuses on its application in entrepreneurship education, particularly in settings where students can draw upon firsthand entrepreneurial experiences.

Background and Pedagogical Approach

Many business schools rely on traditional and live case-based teaching. While these methods are valuable, they have limitations. Traditional case teaching positions students as passive analysts responding to past events, while live cases require high faculty involvement and may suffer from limited client engagement. Additionally, these methods focus on solving external problems rather than fostering deep reflection and holistic thinking.

The SWIF method enhances engagement by having students develop their own cases, transforming them into researchers, interviewers, and writers. This approach fosters critical thinking, ambiguity tolerance, and decision-making skills.

Despite its benefits, SWIF can be difficult to implement, particularly when finding relevant third-party companies. Entrepreneurship education overcomes this by having students write cases based on their own experiences, increasing authenticity and engagement.

At NTNU, graduate entrepreneurship students developed cases on their own start-ups. In their second semester, teams created cases over three weeks, reflecting on key challenges and decision-making moments. This assignment encouraged creative storytelling while reinforcing entrepreneurial learning.

How-to Guide

The following ‘how-to’ guide provides step-by-step guidelines for the case development assignment. The guide serves as an example based on experience with the entire learning process, from introducing the assignment to evaluating the cases created.

Note that the following example could be implemented in any entrepreneurship classroom and tailored to the educator’s context, schedule, and learning objectives. Case development can work at different levels (undergraduate or graduate) within a range of timelines, individually or in groups. The only absolute requirement for success is that students have a particular entrepreneurial experience to draw upon; ideally, students will also have experience with the case method.

Step 1: Introducing the Assignment (100 Minutes)

The assignment introduction should include insights into the case development method. This can be completed in person or online. There can be multiple approaches of this session with the following example representing one possible approach.

  1. Describe the assignment and explain how it relates to the overall course learning outcomes. Present the specific learning goals and your expectations for the assignment.

  2. Specify the target audience for the cases, ideally students at the same educational level, to clarify assignment expectations and demonstrate how the developed cases can be used for future students.

  3. Emphasize the importance of identifying and selecting only one focal topic when writing the case. Linking case development to authentic experience will increase student owner- ship of the assignment.

  4. Present and discuss how individual and group reflection on concrete experiences and actions can facilitate learning in entrepreneurship education. The point of this discussion is to reinforce students’ understanding of why case development facilitates reflection and learning. Students can use weekly written diaries and oral feedback from peers and teachers to practice individual and group reflection. If students are unfamiliar with the practice of reflecting on experiences, more time should be spent here.

  5. Choose two different cases to teach. We used two cases created by previous students to illustrate different structures, narratives, and formats for organizing and writing a case.

    Many students might not be familiar with case learning, which can make the task seem overwhelming at first. It is suggested that comparing and discussing two different cases is an excellent way of framing expectations. At the end of each case, complete a 10–15-minute debrief. Ask students to identify case elements that worked well and which to improve. Encourage students to keep their reflections in mind when developing their cases.

  1. Explain how a case is typically structured. By introducing this structure after point 5, students will experience and discuss case teaching before learning about the theoretical foundations of the case structure. For instance, you can explain that the first part of the case usually introduces the narrative and provides a context for debate and development by posing the core problem: what do we want to solve or decide? Then introduce different possible media formats (plain text, video, podcast, PowerPoint, or some combination of these) and shared general tips for case writing. The case format can be adjusted to fit the context, learning objectives, degree of flexibility, and student group.

  2. Offer a clear overview of time schedules and assignment evaluation criteria.

  3. It can be helpful to provide some examples of possible case topics to get students thinking. It is also advisable to round off the introduction with a Q&A session.

This step ensures that each team has time to identify and reflect on a concrete entrepreneurial experience, challenge, or decision-making event from their start-up. Set aside 1 week for this research phase, which is entirely student-driven, allowing a high level of autonomy.

Supervision and feedback are crucial for SWIF learning, as it is often new to students. Faculty supervision ensures teams stay on track.

Provide each team with 20 minutes of one-on-one supervision, with students setting the agenda based on their Step 2 findings. Let them present their case topic and development plan, allowing faculty to provide feedback on vision and format. While some instructors want to require a uniform case format for easier grading, this may limit creativity.

After supervision, students should have a clear plan for developing their case. While this supervisory process might seem time-consuming, it is an important step in ensuring successful case development as it helps shape the case structure and allows faculty to provide guidance on completing the assignment. In effective supervisions, instructors are rarely called upon during the next step.

Once supervision is complete, the teams can develop their cases, working autonomously with little involvement from faculty members, who should only participate when asked for guidance or additional supervision.

Teams submit their cases for grading based upon the stated evaluation criteria, eleven days after the supervision session. When evaluating cases, instructors can note which ones might be helpful as teaching cases for prospective students and which ones would need additional work.

Faculty members evaluate and grade the cases. Each group gets assigned a grade. If preferred, educators can incorporate strategies for acknowledging each team member’s contribution and adjusting individual grades accordingly. Provisions for including ‘peer evaluation’ are outlined in the next section.

Expanding the Assignment

Peer Feedback

Feedback in its various forms can have powerful and positive impacts on student learning and performance. This can include feed forward, feed up, process feedback, and peer feedback. Feedback may come from teachers or students; it can be corrective and evaluative, or it can facilitate dialogue. For the present purposes, it is useful to focus briefly on peer feedback, where students give feedback regarding both process and outcome.

Peer feedback can be understood as formative assessment and collaborative learning, with benefits for both the student assessed and the peer assessor. Peer feedback can also help control teachers’ workload and increase the number of opportunities for feedback. Although peer feedback may be less accurate than teacher responses, this drawback can be regarded as an acceptable trade-off to the extent that it facilitates student progress. Peer feedback can be included at all stages of the case development assignment. Because it may extend the assignment’s duration, faculty must carefully structure peer feedback—only a limited number of students are likely to participate if the process is unstructured and voluntary.

One of the challenges of teamwork relates to assessing students’ individual contributions. Peer assessment offers one way of ensuring that students work effectively within their team. In peer assessment, a student (or group of students) evaluates others’ assignments and possibly self-evaluates their own work. Each team member rates their colleagues anonymously at the end of the assignment, providing reasons for their evaluation and indicating what grade they feel they deserve and why.

As another possible expansion of the assignment, students might be asked to write a teaching note associated with their developed case. This addition may enhance learning outcomes by allowing students to reflect on their written cases, thus facilitating continuous learning. In this way, students could interpret their case from an experiential perspective by reflecting on practice; the assignment then becomes an iterative, design-based process of systematic reflection. This process could help strengthen students’ entrepreneurial aspirations and their communication and transformative skills and self-efficacy.

Writing a teaching note would require further introductory faculty input to clarify its nature.

Instructors should also explain how and why the teaching note enhances learning outcomes.

As a final element of the assignment, students could be asked to teach their case to a student group, whether younger students in the same programme, a different group at the university, or learners at a local high school. According to the learning pyramid account, teaching others is the most effective form of learning; teaching others is also a form of experiential learning. By teaching a case they have written, students can test it in practice, extending their learning and perhaps inspiring other students by describing their entrepreneurial journey. In addition to gaining confidence by presenting to others, this teaching activity could help students become more aware of how best to communicate entrepreneurial challenges.

Discussion

The Act of Reflecting on Entrepreneurial Experience

Using the SWIF method, students develop cases by reflecting on their entrepreneurial experiences, making case development more engaging and manageable. The only requirement for successful case development is that the students draw upon relevant entrepreneurial experiences.

While teamwork is encouraged, students often divide tasks based on workload and priorities, leading to varied learning outcomes. For example, one student may focus on a prototype while others finalize the case.

Educators may face challenges in ensuring full-team participation, a common issue in group assignments. Entrepreneurial experiences should involve peer interaction, user experimentation, idea generation, pitching, and market research. Reflecting on diverse experiences enhances learning in entrepreneurship education.

The cases were based on students’ own entrepreneurial experiences with their start-ups. The assignment encouraged creative case designs, yielding a diverse range of case topics and designs. In this example of student-directed pedagogy, learning processes emerge directly from the students’ individual experiences. Table 9.1 lists some of the case topics and designs submitted by our students, confirming the diversity of topics and designs.

While student-directed pedagogies may enhance motivation and learning opportunities, educators have limited control over what is learned and how it is learned, making the work challenging to assess. For instance, students designing video cases on IP strategy likely reflect more on IP strategy while learning video production. Similarly, those creating podcasts on equity allocation may reflect more on this topic while developing podcasting skills.

In short, relinquishing control and handing over responsibility is essential when facilitating experiential and authentic learning processes. This decreased control was something we accepted because the primary goal of the assignment was to stimulate reflection. We felt comfortable sharing control and giving graduate students responsibility for their own learning. Educators who seek to include student case development in their entrepreneurship education should to be aware of this requirement and balance control and flexibility based on their contexts.

Entrepreneurship focuses on learning fast from failure. We therefore emphasize the importance of setting aside time to learn about, reflect on, and analyze failure. For example, by reflecting on the mistakes they made when setting up their company’s equity and share structure, one group produced a well-developed case and improved the fairness of their equity and share structure.

This demonstrates how setting aside time to reflect through case development can create learning for students and practical value for their ventures.

Student teams can produce strong and creative case narratives that can serve as a valuable resource for educators for use in future courses.

Educators can work with students to publish the cases; knowing that their cases may be used in future courses or published may motivate students. As another benefit, students often write in a tone that prospective students can more easily identify with, and educators may even find it helpful to invite graduates to visit in order to make classes more engaging and authentic.

Implications for Case Teaching Practice and Reframing the Case Method for Entrepreneurship Education

The material presented here explains how entrepreneurship educators can help students develop cases linked to their own entrepreneurial experiences. While involving students in case development is not a new idea, applying this teaching method in entrepreneurship education represents a novel contribution.

Encouraging students to develop cases based on their own entrepreneurial experiences addresses some of the criticisms of case-based teaching mentioned earlier and can help overcome the known challenges of developing cases for third-party companies. By understanding these issues, educators can devise more active classes that will increase student involvement.

In general, students prefer to work on assignments they perceive as relevant. As entrepreneurship students tend to focus more on their entrepreneurial project or start-up than on their learning, they often remain unaware of what they have learned. The primary purpose of the case development assignment is to ensure that students reflect on their experiences so that their learning becomes explicit, thus adding direct value to their ventures.

Inviting students to develop their cases can also have a motivating effect on educators.

When students produce creative cases, evaluation and grading are likely to be more enjoyable. At the same time, student-directed pedagogies involving learning processes that emerge directly from students’ individual experiences may limit educators’ control over the learning process as a whole. The present chapter contributes to this discussion and highlights the need for educators to be aware of the likely challenges when introducing student case development into the entrepreneurship classroom. While our students reflected on authentic entrepreneurial experiences from their start-ups, the teaching example described is flexible and can be implemented into any entrepreneurship classroom where different entrepreneurship experiences occur. In this sense, educators retain control to align the assignment with their individual contexts and learning objectives.

Based on

REFRAMING THE CASE METHOD IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION,

Karin Wigger, Lise Aaboen, Dag Haneberg, Siri Jakobsen, and Thomas Lauvås –

9781800881150

Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 05/28/2024 10:07:23AM

via Open Access. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 License

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Chapter 9: Student case development based on entrepreneurial experiences: a guide for entrepreneurship educators, by Even Haug Larsen and Karoline Kaspersen.

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