Learning by doing in business education. Using hackathons to improve the teaching and learning of entrepreneurial skills

Currently, the teaching of entrepreneurship skills is mostly dominated by strategic approaches that do not teach students evident examples of what happen in a real-world company in terms of entrepreneurship. It is assumed that practical entrepreneurial skills are acquired at the university. Using a hackathon will put into practice and nurture entrepreneurial skills. This is the first study of its kind attempting to fill the gap in using hackathons and a set of practice-based pedagogical tools to teach entrepreneurial skills in UK business schools. This paper sheds light on the issues associated with the use of hackathons to teach practice-based entrepreneurial skills to undergraduate students at a UK university. The study benchmarks the pedagogical tools currently used within the module to nurture entrepreneurial skills and how are used by the students participating in the hackathon. The methodology to carry out this study is based on: academic performance indicators and a semi-structured interview with students, who have participated in the hackathon during the last four years. The information from the interviews is then analysed using NVivo