Student Challenges in Entrepreneurship Education: Planning For Uncertainty
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By Sølvi Solvoll, Associate Professor at Nord University Business School & Dag Håkon Haneberg, Associate Professor at NTNU
Student challenges are defined as faculty-facilitated short-term processes where students address problems presented by client(s) where innovation is needed and propose solution(s) to the presented problem as part of a curricular course or extracurricular activity. The students’ task during a student challenge is to interact with the client and other external actors to provide a response to the problem that would provide value for the client.
Unlike traditional case teaching, student challenges integrate real-world engagement and problem-solving, distinguishing them from live cases, hackathons, and consultancy projects in terms of purpose, problem formulation, and timeframe.
About this Article
This article is based on the chapter Student Challenges in Entrepreneurship Education: Planning for Uncertainty by Sølvi Solvoll and Dag Håkon Haneberg, from the book Reframing the Case Method in Entrepreneurship Education. We will explore the dynamics of student challenges, focusing on the tensions between stakeholders and strategies to navigate them.
Drawing on insights from seven cases at Nord University and NTNU—analyzed through faculty and client interviews, along with student feedback—the chapter provides practical recommendations for designing and implementing effective student challenges.
We conclude with a discussion on the broader implications for entrepreneurship education, offering guidance for faculty and external partners looking to integrate these experiential learning opportunities into their teaching practices.
Use Case
With their adaptability, student challenges can be embedded into entrepreneurship courses or exist as standalone initiatives aimed at fostering entrepreneurial skills and mindsets.
They create a unique learning space where students navigate early-stage innovation while balancing the expectations of faculty and clients. However, managing these diverse stakeholders presents challenges. Clients seek practical solutions for immediate business needs, faculty must align activities with learning goals, and students bring their own motivations and creative energy. Striking this balance is crucial for ensuring engagement and meaningful learning outcomes.
Key definitions
Student challenges: faculty-facilitated short-term processes in which groups of students address problems presented by client(s) where innovation is needed and propose solution(s) to the presented problem as part of a curricular course or extracurricular activity.
The students’ task during a student challenge is to interact with the client and other external actors to provide a response to the problem that would provide value for the client.
Student challenges are a new pedagogical approach in entrepreneurship education, requiring careful planning despite their short duration (typically 2 days to 2 weeks). Before the challenge begins, faculty collaborate with external clients to formulate a broad problem. Students, working in multidisciplinary teams, refine and solve this problem, often with the help of facilitators. Methods like wayfaring (Steinert & Leifer, 2012) and design thinking (Kleinsmann et al., 2017) can support this process. The challenge concludes with student presentations, evaluated either through grading (curricular) or competition (extracurricular).
Student challenges share similarities with live cases, which also involve real-world problems and client interactions. However, they differ in their short timeframe, competitive elements, and focus on early-stage innovation—aligning them more closely with hackathons. While hackathons are usually tech-focused, student challenges apply to broader fields. Additionally, unlike consultancy projects, which are long-term and client-driven, student challenges emphasize student learning and leadership in the innovation process.
Despite some overlap with live cases, hackathons, and consultancy projects, student challenges uniquely foster problem-based and experiential learning (Kolb & Kolb, 2005), self-directed inquiry (Garrison, 1997), and collaborative teamwork (Decuyper et al., 2010). Positioned at the “fuzzy front end” of innovation (Khurana & Rosenthal, 1997), they encourage iteration and exploration, requiring faculty to embrace ambiguity and guide students through an evolving process.
The nature of the early-stage innovation process implies that organizers, such as university faculty, must acknowledge and accept the iterative, ambiguous, and uncertain path of the process. Consequently, organizers must take on several roles during the student challenge (Wraae et al., 2020).
Empirical Background
Engage, a government-funded center for excellence in entrepreneurship education, was founded in 2017 as a partnership between Nord and NTNU. Its goal is to equip students with entrepreneurial skills to become change agents. Engage has developed student challenges as a pedagogical tool to help students navigate uncertainty and interact with real-world stakeholders. An empirical study of seven student challenges, held from 2018 to 2020 with 269 participants and 27 case problems from external clients, explored how these challenges balance stakeholder tensions. Data was collected through written materials, student feedback (N = 93), and faculty interviews.
Four types of student challenges were studied:
- Lofoten Sustainable Tourism Challenge (Type A): A 3-day extracurricular challenge focused on sustainable tourism in Lofoten. Twenty-five students tackled local tourism conflicts and presented solutions to a jury, with the winning team earning a prize and program qualification.
- Blast-Off Week (Type B): A 5-day curricular challenge within Nord’s Innovation and Change Processes course. Students received lectures, formed teams, and solved real-world problems in health, industry, and sustainability. Their final grade included jury-evaluated results.
- Seafood Industry Transportation Challenge (Type C): A 7-day extracurricular challenge co-organized with the University of Washington, where students optimized seafood transport to Asian markets. Solutions were pitched to a jury, and winners traveled to UW. The contestants were 20 students from NTNU and 12 from UW.
- Health-Tech Challenge (Type D): A 2-week extracurricular event where students addressed real-life surgical problems sourced by NTNU’s Future Operating Rooms group. Students from engineering studies, medicine, and other programmes were divided into groups by the organizers. Teams proposed solutions to a jury, competing for a €2,000 prize to further develop their ideas.
These challenges illustrate how Engage fosters experiential learning through interdisciplinary teamwork, problem-solving, and innovation.
Insights From the Interviews
Interviews with faculty, organizers, students, and clients highlighted important factors for designing student challenges. A central issue was whether problems should be broadly or narrowly defined. Open-ended problems encourage creativity but can be difficult to understand, while specific problems make implementation easier but may limit innovation. For example, students in the Health-Tech Challenge (Type D) found some problems vague and difficult to grasp, while a participant in the Lofoten Sustainable Tourism Challenge (Type A) felt too much structure made them feel like consultants rather than innovators.
Another key finding was that learning outcomes were not always immediately clear to students. Some only recognized their growth in later years. Faculty also noted that valuable learning occurred during student interactions with clients and mentors.
However, challenges also revealed tensions in group work. Some students dominated discussions, while others disengaged. Faculty found that frameworks like wayfaring helped guide teams through the innovation process. A structured approach, such as assigning facilitators or creating group work contracts, was suggested to improve collaboration and problem-solving.
Finally, the study emphasized balancing faculty support with student independence. While guidance is essential, excessive intervention can limit student leadership development. One participant initially feared the student challenge but later considered it one of their most valuable learning experiences. Hence, well-structured challenges can transform students’ perspectives on education, fostering confidence and adaptability in uncertain environments.
Based on the analysis of seven student challenges, three key recommendations emerge for faculties integrating this pedagogical approach in their entrepreneurship education.
1. Prioritizing the Learning Process Over Solutions
Faculty, students, and clients should focus on learning rather than the specific solutions generated. While innovative outcomes are valuable, their primary role is to facilitate learning. The study highlights that emphasizing the learning process as the core objective leads to greater educational impact.
2. Balancing Structure and Flexibility in Planning
Successfully organizing student challenges requires managing uncertainty. Faculty must determine what aspects should be planned in advance and what should emerge organically. While embracing uncertainty enhances learning, such as having designated facilitators—especially in the initial phase—can help guide students through the process.
3. Managing Expectations Among Stakeholders
Clients should recognize that student challenges are primarily about learning through innovation rather than delivering fully developed solutions. The real value comes from students questioning the client’s current assumptions, ideas and assumptions. Assessment criteria should reflect this by evaluating the process, teamwork, and engagement rather than just final outputs. For extracurricular activities, jury evaluations should also account for process-based criteria to ensure a holistic assessment.
By implementing these recommendations, faculty can create student challenges that not only foster innovation but also enhance entrepreneurial learning and critical thinking.
Implications for Case Teaching Practice and Reframing the Case Method for Entrepreneurship Education
Students will often find that a student challenge fundamentally differs from what they are used to in higher education. For students who have mainly experienced traditional teacher-led, lecture-based, and narrow-focused (entrepreneurship) education, a student challenge will be a new, strange, and maybe scary experience. Faculty could take measures to make students safer in the new situation, but the core implication for higher education institutions is that they should expose students to student challenges from the first year of their college or university degree programmes. Student challenges may be a fruitful first entry into entrepreneurship education.
The present chapter contributes to reframing the case method by defining student challenges as a fruitful pedagogical approach to teach students to embrace uncertainty, which is an important feature of entrepreneurship education. For faculty and clients, planning for uncertainty is a core process in preparing and conducting student challenges. The recommendations provided also suggest how the student challenge can be aligned with the stated learning outcome and the student assessment.
References
Sølvi Solvoll and Dag Håkon Haneberg – 9781800881150
Downloaded from PubFactory at 11/16/2022 02:03:01PM via free access
Chapter 10: Student challenges in entrepreneurship education: planning for uncertainty,
REFRAMING THE CASE METHOD IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION