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It has been said in recent years that little evidence exists to show that the business planning process enables entrepreneurial learning. This paper advances a design thinking approach to teaching and learning for the conception, design, characterization, prototyping, testing, pitching and innovation of new venture concepts. The curricular approach and the associated scholarly inquiry project are described, as are the encouraging results obtained as we have begun implementing the so-called Venture Design Studio as part of our renewed and now cross-campus entrepreneurship offerings. This includes an approach to assessment that facilitates student-led learning, engages experienced entrepreneurs as "choreographers" and results in the design of new venture models that are both highly innovative and highly feasible. The number of used textbook stores and student-bars being proposed has been driven down in favour of significantly more ventures deemed to be highly scalable. Implications are discussed for the design of curricula that help students reach into and catalyze innovation within their local ecosystems.
Introduction
Educational Context and Challenges
Calls are being made around the world for new approaches to education (Owen et al. 2006; Guntram 2007) on the premise that we are part of an information society characterized by: technology-savvy students who learn more by absorption and experience than by reading a training manual or attending a course (Brown 1999); a shift in the focus of creativity from generating original content to the timely rip-mix-burn reshaping of existing content (Ito 2007); increasing requirements for interdisciplinary work carried out by teams across functional and institutional boundaries (Guntram 2007); new ways of perceiving and organizing knowledge in society (Weinberger 2005) and in the educational sector (Cunningham and Duffy 2000); and new forms of teacher and learner interaction enabled by innovative technologies and approaches to copyright (Dillon and Bacon 2006). And it is frequently argued that Web 2.0 technologies are causing a disruption in higher education much like those that took place or are taking place in the music, newspaper, book and television industries (Christensen, Johnson and Horn 2008; Tapscott and Williams 2010). In order to survive in the networked, global economy of the future, universities are being told to embrace collaborative learning and collaborative knowledge production (Tapscott and Williams 2010) and teachers are being encouraged to shift their...