Towards an Opportunity Identification Competence Assessment Test (OICAT) for Students in Higher Education

Author(s):

Martin Mulder(presenting / submitting)Jarl Kampen Ana Naia Thomas Lans Harm Biemans Yvette Baggen

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 08 A, Assessment and Learning: Diverse Perspectives

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-10

09:00-10:30

Room:

393. [Main]

Chair:

Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela

Contribution

In higher education, it has become a core challenge to foster the development of entrepreneurial competences (Fayolle, 2013; Lans, Verstegen, & Mulder, 2011). Students need those entrepreneurial competences to be able to deal with entrepreneurial challenges, with which they increasingly have to deal during their working life. Those who are able to successfully deal with entrepreneurial challenges, are able to identify opportunities and hereby to show innovative behaviour which is asked for by employers. Therefore, especially the entrepreneurial competence opportunity identification receives attention from higher education as being a competence that should be taught.

Opportunity identification is defined in line with Wood and McKinley (2010) as “the ability of individuals to generate and evaluate ideas for new products or services that address a particular pain, solve a particular problem or market need, or create a new market need, and thereby add value’ (adapted from Baggen et al., submitted). The opportunity identification process starts with the generation of opportunity ideas: first, initial ideas thought of by an individual. Subsequently, opportunity identification involves being able to evaluate which opportunities have the most potential to become a successful startup.

However, even now the importance of opportunity identification competence (OIC) is recognized, a scientific standard to assess OIC is still missing. Opportunity identification is measured before with the use of self-assessments and interviews, but the psychometric properties of those instruments are debatable because of recall-biases and retrospection (Corbett, 2007; Grégoire, Shepherd, & Schurer Lambert, 2010). Therefore, several authors argued for the development of performance measures which assess the performance of participants more directly. For that reason, this study elaborates on the development and testing of a performance assessment to investigate the OIC of students in higher education, called the Opportunity Identification Competence Assessment Test (OICAT).

Research questions

The OICAT consists of two tasks, task 1 is related to opportunity idea generation and task 2 is related to the evaluation of opportunities. To develop and test the OICAT, it is applied among two different student populations. One in the Netherlands at the Wageningen University and one in Portugal at the Lisbon University. In this study, we aim to answer the following research questions:

To what extent do business idea generation (Task 1) and idea evaluation (Task 2) correlate?
How do students perform on OICAT task 1 and 2 and to what extent do students from The Netherlands and Portugal differ?

Method

Instrument development OICAT Task 1 was related to business opportunity idea generation. The instrument of Corbett (2007) was used to develop this task. He asked his participants to come up with business ideas related to technology. For the OICAT, sustainable development was chosen as case, since sustainable development is a general, societal topic for all students these days. The students had to read the case and generate as much ideas as possible within ten minutes. OICAT Task 2 was related to the evaluation of opportunities for their potential to become a successful start-up. The empirical work of Baron and Ensley (2006) was used to develop this task. They asked novice (first-time) and experienced entrepreneurs how they determined the potential for success of business ideas. Based on interviews, they created a prototype of a novice and an experienced entrepreneur. In OICAT Task 2 we presented ten arguments: five in line with the profile of a novice entrepreneur and five in line with the profile of an experienced entrepreneur. The students were asked to select the five arguments they thought were most important when determining the potential of business opportunities in five minutes. Sample and procedure From the Dutch university, 115 masterstudents with a mean age of 23.51 years participated in the testing. From the Portuguese university, 142 bachelorstudents with a mean age of 19.20 years participated in the testing. After a short introduction, in which the procedure was explained and the anonymity of the students stressed, the students started working on the tasks. The present researcher warned the students when they had half of the time left and when they had one minute left to work on the task. Analysis Since the generation of business ideas is closely related to creativity, a classification of Guildford (1967) was used to analyse the results of OICAT task 1. The ideas were scored on comprehensibility, concreteness, and were assigned to a content related category. Based on the number of categories a participant generated ideas in, a flexibility score was calculated (the more categories, the higher the score). To analyse OICAT task 2, the number of selected arguments in line with the profile of an experienced entrepreneur was counted. Next to descriptive statistics, Chi-square (is there a relation between variables?) and Pearson R (what is the origin of the relation?) were used to analyse the results.

Expected Outcomes

The content of the generated ideas was comparable among the student samples. However, the Dutch students generated significantly a higher amount of ideas (M = 6.43, SD = 3.61) than the Portuguese students (M = 2.28, SD = 1.48). Also, their ideas were more concrete and flexible than the ideas of the Portuguese students. A possible explanation for this finding is a difference in prior knowledge among the students, since sustainable development is interwoven as a main topic in all studies of the Dutch university. Students from both samples appreciate the argument “solving a customer’s problem” as an important argument when evaluating the potential of business opportunities. This argument is in line with the profile of an experienced entrepreneur. However, the students also appreciate the novelty of an opportunity as being important, although this argument is in line with the profile of a novice entrepreneur. Furthermore, the results show that OICAT task 1 and 2 do not correlate with each other. In higher education, the OICAT could be used to assess students on their OIC. The results of the OICAT could provide insight into how the students perform, and could be used to create awareness among students on how other students reason when it comes to the early stages of entrepreneurship. Moreover, the results suggest that generating business opportunity ideas is a distinct ability from evaluating business opportunities. This could mean that innovation teams should include people who are strong in generating ideas and others who are strong at evaluating opportunities. The lack of methodological rigor in the field of entrepreneurship is a major issue (Fayolle, 2013). By developing the OICAT, we aim to contribute to the development of performance assessments to measure entrepreneurial competences, such as opportunity identification.

References

Baggen, Y., Mainert, J., Lans, T., Biemans, H. J. A., Greiff, S., & Mulder, M. (submitted). Linking complex problem solving to opportunity identification competence within the context of innovation. Submitted for Publication. International Journal of Lifelong Education. Baron R. A. & Ensley, M. (2006). Opportunity recognition as the detection of meaningful patterns: evidence of novice and experienced entrepreneurs. Management Science, 52 (9), 1331-1344. Corbett, A. C. (2007). Learning asymmetries and the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities. Journal of Business Venturing, 22 (1), 97-118. Fayolle, A. (2013). Personal views on the future of entrepreneurship education. Entrepreneurship and regional Development 25 (7/8), 692-701. Grégoire, D. A., Shepherd, D. A., & Schurer Lambert, L. (2010). Measuring opportunity- recognition beliefs: illustrating and validating an experimental approach. Organizational Research Methods, 13 (1), 114-145. Lans, T., Verstegen, J., & Mulder, M. (2011). Analysing, pursuing and networking: towards a validated three-factor framework for entrepreneurial competence for small firm perspective. International Small Business Journal, 29 (6), 695-713. Wood, M. S. & McKinley, W. (2010). The production of entrepreneurial opportunity: a constructivist perspective. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 4, 66-84.

Author Information

Martin Mulder (presenting / submitting)

Wageningen University, Netherlands, The

Jarl Kampen

Wageningen University, Netherlands, The; University of Antwerp, Belgium

Ana Naia

Lisbon University, Portugal

Thomas Lans

Wageningen University, Netherlands, The

Harm Biemans

Wageningen University, Netherlands, The

Yvette Baggen

Wageningen University

Education and Competence Studies

Wageningen

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