Entrepreneurial Passion in Entrepreneurship Education

By interviewing alumni about their experiences of entrepreneurship education and post-graduation careers, this study explored how students can harness entrepreneurial passion in a venture creation programme. The findings emphasise the importance of learning ‘soft skills' in entrepreneurship education, as well as experiencing the ‘necessary evil' of failure and learning from failure in a safe environment. Most importantly, the chapter illustrates the connection between safety, action, emotion, and passion in a VCP. Lastly, this study highlights that harnessing obsessive passion into a sustainable form is an important yet difficult task. Passion changes over time, and VCP students harness this passion to achieve ‘sustainable obsessive and harmonious passion'. This study contributes to the literature on the development of entrepreneurial universities by focusing on the students and their entrepreneurial passion.

The Impact of Learning From Failure on New Ventures’ Sustainable Development

How to absorb failure experiences to achieve reunification and turn crises into opportunities is crucial for enterprises. We examine the effect of learning from failure on new ventures’ sustainable development from the lens of resource orchestration theory. With 193 samples of entrepreneurs in Mainland China, this study provides the first quantitative evidence regarding how learning from failure influences new ventures’ sustainable development through entrepreneurial dynamic capability and strategic decision comprehensiveness. Stepwise regression analysis results show that learning from failure has a positive impact on the entrepreneurial dynamic capability and strategic decision comprehensiveness. Entrepreneurial dynamic capability and strategic decision comprehensiveness positively influence new ventures’ sustainable development, and exert mediating roles between learning from failure and new ventures’ sustainable development.

Shame on You! When and Why Failure-Induced Shame Impedes Employees’ Learning From Failure in the Chinese Context

The emotional experience brought about by failure, especially the important roles of negative emotions in learning behavior after failure, has received increasingly more attention from organization management scholars. Research on the impact of employees’ sense of failure-induced shame is still controversial. Based on the Chinese context, according to the process model of emotion regulation theory, we have studied the influence of failure-induced shame on employees’ learning from failure and the conditions that have boundary effects on this process. Through a questionnaire analysis of 776 samples from Chinese high-tech enterprises, the results show the following: (1) shame has a negative relationship with learning from failure (2) project commitment alleviates the negative relationship between shame and learning from failure, and (3) restoration orientation alleviates the negative relationship between shame and learning from failure while loss orientation cannot. Our results further enrich the research on negative emotions related to failure and provide a theoretical basis for the failure management of Chinese companies.

New venture dissolution and the comobility of new venture teams

While the dissolution of new ventures is a common phenomenon in the organizational landscape, it seldom means the end of the road for those involved in the new venture. Nevertheless, most research treats this dissolution with a sense of finality. Using the Danish Integrated Database for Labor Market Research (IDA), we explore the persistence of cofounders and early employees to continue their work relationships after the dissolution of the new venture. We investigate where these team members continue their career and whether they pursue entrepreneurship together in another new venture. Overall, over 18.3% move jointly, and comobility is more prevalent among new venture team members who worked jointly prior to founding the new venture and among those new venture teams demonstrating high levels of homogeneity. Moreover, comovers tend toward small firms, and comobility occurs largely in similar industry. A large share of comovers move to new ventures, which is indicative of serial or habitual new venture teams. This also raises further question on team-level dimension of learning from failure.

Towards safer healthcare: qualitative insights from a process view of organisational learning from failure

ObjectivesThis study adopted a process view of organisational learning to investigate the barriers to effective organisational learning from medical errors.MethodsQualitative data were collected from 40 clinicians in high and low performing hospitals. The fit between the organisational learning process and socio-technical factors was investigated systematically from a pre-reporting stage to reporting and post-reporting stages.ResultsThe analysis uncovered that the major stumbling blocks to active learning lie largely in the post-reporting stages and that they are rooted in social rather than technical issues. Although the experience of the higher-performing hospital provides valuable pointers in terms of creating more trusting environment and using the potential of small failures towards ways in which the organisational learning process in the lower hospital might be improved, due to lack of local mangers’ proactive engagement in integrating changes into practice the active learning takes place in neither of the hospitals.ConclusionsTo ensure that the change solutions are firmly incorporated into the culture and routine practice of the hospital, we need to focus on fostering an organisational culture that encourages positive cooperation and mutual interactions between local managers and frontline clinicians. This process will lead to double-loop learning and an increase in system safety.

On Embracing the Concept of Becoming Environmental Problem Solvers: The Trainee Perspective on Key Elements of Success, Essential Skills and Mindset

Life in the Anthropocene is characterized by many environmental problems, and, unfortunately, more continue to emerge. Although much effort is focused on identifying problems, this does not necessarily translate to solutions. This transcends to the training environment where students are often adept at understanding and dissecting problems but rarely are explicitly equipped with the skills and mindset to solve them. Here a group of undergraduate students and their instructors reflect on embracing the concept of becoming environmental problem solvers. We first identify themes associated with historical and contemporary environmental successes that emerged from our reading – or more specifically, we identify the recipe elements that underlie environmental success stories. Key elements of success involved setting clear objectives, identifying the scale of the problem, learning from failure, and consulting diverse knowledge sources. Next, we reflect on the skills and mindset that would best serve environmental problem solvers and enable future successes. Essential skills include innovative and critical thinking, ability to engage in collaborative teamwork, capacity to work across boundaries, and resilience. In terms of mindset, key attributes include the need for courage, enthusiasm and commitment, optimism, open mindedness, tenacity, and adaptability. We conclude with a brief discussion of ideas for revising training and curriculum to ensure that students are equipped with the aforementioned skills and mindset. The ideas shared here should contribute to ensuring that the next generation of learners have the ability to develop solutions that will work for the benefit of the environment, biodiversity, and humanity. Solving environmental problems will increasingly fall to the next generation so it is time to ensure that they are prepared for that task.