Training Entrepreneurial Leadership inside Organizations

Roebuck (2004), defines entrepreneurial leadership (EL) as "organizing a group of people to achieve a common goal using proactive entrepreneurial behavior by optimizing risk, innovating to take advantage of opportunities, taking personal responsibility, and managing change within a dynamic environment for the benefit of an organization". EL is critical in boosting organizational effectiveness and company business. It also extends economic success and is related to an organization's entrepreneurial values. This expansion has an impact on a variety of organizational factors, including organizational rejuvenation, creativity, innovation, and the ability to successfully identify and seize opportunities. A definition of entrepreneurial education in line with this has been proposed by Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship (Moberg et al., 2012): “Content, methods, and activities supporting the creation of knowledge, competencies, and experiences that make it possible for students to initiate and participate in entrepreneurial value creating processes”. According to a survey of the literature on entrepreneurial learning, the term has been defined based on the gained knowledge and abilities during the two-phase entrepreneurship development process. The first phase provides individuals with the necessary information and abilities for new venture creation and leadership. In this phase, entrepreneurial learning is based on cognitive processes of acquiring and organizing entrepreneurial knowledge and abilities as educators seek to successfully equip students with theoretical knowledge and practical entrepreneurship skills. In the second phase, future ELs develop their competencies labeled as “non-cognitive factors”, such as perseverance, self-efficacy, learning, and social skills through performing different tasks and roles involved in entrepreneurship and facing the challenges and problems of leading an entrepreneurial activity in their organizations. Entrepreneurship experts believe that entrepreneurial learning is mostly experiential, which means that individuals learn entrepreneurial skills by directly taking over the responsibilities and duties connected with starting up and directing entrepreneurial activities inside firms. Most of the entrepreneurial learning definitions are therefore based on Kolb’s experiential learning model (1984) including experimentation, conceptualization, reflection, and social interaction. Social interactive learning (SIL) has an influential impact on enabling entrepreneurs to explore opportunities and cope with crises associated with new business management. Students' self-awareness of their entrepreneurial aptitude, maturity in communication skills and networking, and ability to utilize gained information to solve challenges are all enhanced through social contact. Moreover, SIL promotes entrepreneurial creativity and innovation by fostering synergy between individual and group learning, making entrepreneurial learning more in-depth and knowledge transfer more durable. It is also argued that a significant amount of entrepreneurial learning happens through reflection. Reflective learning is the process of examining, understanding, connecting, and integrating information and abilities gained from multiple resources such as previous experiences and social interactions. It helps future EL to internalize, reinterpret, and reorganize their understanding of various events, achieve a better degree of knowledge by examining the links between these occurrences, and successfully manage their future entrepreneurial activities using those learning results. Other typical features of entrepreneurial education are the emphasis on possibilities as well as issues, and iterative experimentation in conjunction with external stakeholders. Many other aspects of entrepreneurial education are also rarely applied in more traditional scholarship approaches, such as the focus on value and artifact creation. All the aforementioned methods explain to a large extent why entrepreneurial development training can trigger much higher levels of motivation and experienced relevancy, engagement, and deep learning among trainees compared to other standard pedagogical techniques. The most common reason that researchers and experts promote entrepreneurial education is that entrepreneurship is seen as a major engine for economic growth and job creation. Entrepreneurial education is also frequently considered a response to the increasingly globalized, uncertain, and complex VUCA world we live in, requiring all people and organizations in society to be increasingly equipped with entrepreneurial competencies. Students and younger workforce members such as Millennials and Generation Z when entering the employment market carry with them a set of expectations and enthusiasms which is formed by a new set of informational resources that enable immediate connectivity and experience sharing. They are particularly interested in opportunities to learn new things, to work in innovative ways, and are more prone to take calculated risks compared to Baby Boomers and Generation X. As the younger generation has been brought up in circumstances that are continuously and rapidly changing, they prefer to work in similar environments. They are easily motivated to think about the new idea or spot the next opportunity and are mainly looking for workplaces providing high job autonomy and freedom, and opportunities to create and innovate. They are also keen on mentorship opportunities related to gaining knowledge, competencies, and entrepreneurship experience. These capabilities make them a perfect entrepreneurial material that can easily and efficiently help their employers to successfully compete in and create new markets. Besides the common economic development and job creation as reasons to promote entrepreneurial education, there is also a less common but increasing emphasis on the effects entrepreneurial activities can have on future EL joy, confidence, engagement, and overall job satisfaction. Finally, a significant role of entrepreneurship in taking on important societal challenges has positioned entrepreneurial education as means to empower people and organizations in creating social values for the public good. In the future, we will hopefully see more governmental and corporate initiatives leading to the establishment and strengthening of explicit support structures in schools, colleges, universities, and workplaces as organizational survival and prosperity may depend upon how quickly a critical mass of students and young employees can be helped to become motivated intrapreneurs, ELs and committed business partners.