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ACADEMIC ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a new perspective on entrepreneurship curriculum design, one that is founded upon the emerging research into the cognitive skills that successful entrepreneurs possess and deploy. Specifically, this paper borrows from a new book written by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner. Gardners book, Five Minds for the Future, purports to be an intellectual foundation for general education and curriculum development. This paper utilizes Gardners "minds" approach as a theoretical framework specific to the challenge of developing curriculum for teaching entrepreneurship. Five minds for the entrepreneurial future are developed, along with their implications for entrepreneurship curriculum development and design.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This paper proposes a new perspective on entrepreneurship education and curriculum design, one that is founded upon the emerging research into the cognitive skills that successful entrepreneurs possess and deploy. Specifically, this paper borrows from a new book written by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner. Gardners book, Five Minds for the Future, purports to be an intellectual foundation for general education and curriculum development. In his book Gardner develops detailed arguments for five specific "minds" that individuals will need to be effective in the future:
The disciplined mind The synthesizing mind The creating mind The respectful mind The ethical mind
This paper utilizes Gardner6s "minds" approach as a theoretical framework specific to the challenge of developing curriculum for teaching entrepreneurship. Following Gardner, each entrepreneurial mind developed in this paper is a meta-category representation of a host of cognitive sub-skills that have been identified through research to be unique to successful entrepreneurs. The five minds for the entrepreneurial future are:
The opportunity recognizing mind The designing mind The risk managing mind The resilient mind The effectuating mind
Taken as a whole, these five minds provide an intellectual foundation for entrepreneurship education and curriculum development. The articulation of the aggregated cognitive sub-skills in terms of entrepreneurial minds provides curriculum designers with a handy taxonomy, not unlike those used by general education curriculum designers. In addition, each of the entrepreneurial minds is based on a rich and growing literature that focuses on the cognitive skills that successful entrepreneurs possess. Thus, there is ample opportunity for curriculum designers to develop skill building exercises and activities that target the various sub-skills. Importantly, most of these cognitive...