Experiential Entrepreneurship Education in Canada - new Venture Creation While Earning a Masters Degree

In the last 20 years, there has been a shift from studying entrepreneurship as a phenomenon to learning the skills needed to become an entrepreneur. More recently, there has been a shift towards teaching the skills in the context of starting an actual real business. This paper describes the results of an experiment that implemented an industry-proven technology-based new-venture-creation methodology into the academic environment in a Canadian university. It also describes the pedagogical design of the masters program that leveraged this methodology. First of its kind in Canada, The Xerox Centre for Engineering Entrepreneurship and Innovation (XCEEi) at McMaster University offers a masters program to students who want to pursue entrepreneurship as a career option. Students practice starting up their own businesses while they pursue their Masters degree. XCEEi students participate in commercializing technologies in real life situations. McMaster masters program is compared with the two-year masters program offered by the Entrepreneurship school at Chalmers University of Technology, which is considered one of the most successful new-venture-creation Masters programs in the Sweden. It is believed that top four factors, influencing the success of such programs, are: Access to seed funding, involvement of seasoned entrepreneurs in program delivery, integration with an existing university commercialization ecosystem, and finally financial sustainability of the programs. Based on interviews and surveys, the paper concludes that the first two factors are the most influential in determining the quality of experiential education and the students' learning experience. However, the commercial success of the students' ventures depends on the quality of the ideas and students, access to follow-on investment, and finally integration with the university commercialization ecosystem. Venture creation masters programs could be key tools in realizing economic value from universities research. Students should be perceived as crucial filters of ideas and human feeders for the different governmental and regional innovation centers.