Advancing entrepreneurship education and responsibility

In mid-December 2019, Oulu Business School's faculty members Sari Perätalo (Martti Ahtisaari Institute) and Jan Hermes (Department of Marketing, Management & International Business) visited Kemmy Business School, the University of Limerick, in Western Ireland. Kemmy Business School is one of Ireland’s leading business schools with an AACSB accreditation. Kemmy Business School has a strong focus on innovative entrepreneurship education, and additionally, it is a champion signatory of the UNGC’s PRME initiative, emphasizing the role business schools and their graduates play in and for society.

During several open-minded and fruitful discussions with Annmarie Ryan, who is a lecturer in marketing, and other representatives of Kemmy Business School, we learned about their experience in advancing the school’s entrepreneurship education and responsibility agenda.

We took note of best practices for monitoring and reporting on responsibility progress, for which Kemmy Business School was awarded by PRME in 2018. In autumn 2020 also Oulu Business School will report on its responsibility progress in education and research. Exchanging ideas about how to report, but also about how to strengthen responsibility as a cross-cutting theme in research and education, gave us confidence in succeeding.

Also, like in Oulu Business School, the focus of the entrepreneurship courses in Kemmy Business School is around developing students’ entrepreneurial behavior and generating business opportunities. Thus, we were especially interested in hearing about a fascinating development that is currently undergoing Kemmy Business School’s entrepreneurship education. They are taking great efforts at molding it more to the needs of students’ entrepreneurship journey, offering theoretical and practical input at points in time and in ways that support students’ learning best. This puts particular strain on traditional curriculum structures which typically offer learning opportunities in a rather rigid fashion. Kemmy Business School developed a transition tool for this which we will analyze with interest.

We want to thank Kemmy Business School and Annmarie Ryan for hosting our visit!

Text: Sari Perätalo & Jan Hermes