Introducing the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship - a game-based teaching approach

Entrepreneurship matters. In modern open economies, entrepreneurship is one of the key aspects for economic growth and is often thought of as the act of commercializing on an innovation. Teaching and learning entrepreneurship is therefore of importance and schools, colleges and universities can play an important role by including entrepreneurship and innovation in their curricula. Governments and universities worldwide are pushing for education programs that produce more “entrepreneurial engineers” who are “bilingual” in the sense that they possess dual managerial and technical competencies.

The Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship (BMoE) is a holistic teaching and learning approach that enables engineers to be more entrepreneurial. It encompasses three main elements: infrastructure, mindset and tactics. Infrastructure and tactics are covered in most entrepreneurial curricula, whereas only few curricula explicitly include the mindset perspective. The Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship is based on the hypothesis that the mindset of an entrepreneur can be characterized by a set of behavioral patterns and that an inductive game-based teaching approach is a successful vehicle for introducing and re-enforcing these. The game-based teaching approach lets the students explore his/her current mindset and compare it with that of successful entrepreneurs. The paper presents the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship, the pedagogical and psychological theories on which it is based, the set of behavioral patterns and the game-based teaching approach that is used. The method is still under development and further research (e.g. longitudinal studies) is planned.