Out of the Blue: How might flashmobs support the development of creativity and entrepreneurship in entrepreneurial education?

Questions we care about Entrepreneurship educators may be called upon to develop creativity and entrepreneurial capabilities amongst students, yet the small business and innovation management literature suggest that creativity and entrepreneurship are seen as separate processes leading to new products and start-ups (Burns, 2010; Bessant and Tidd, 2007). As a result, this paper explores what the theoretical and conceptual links may be between creative and entrepreneurial processes. To achieve this, a range of learning activities in formal education settings are evaluated to consider how creativity and entrepreneurship may be both combined together theoretically and developed in practice by students through flashmobs in entrepreneurial education. Approach Focusing on cognitive and social processes, we develop a conceptual model of the iterative nature of creativity as a cognitive, aesthetic and social process, and entrepreneurship as a cognitive and social process of entrepreneurial sense-giving. This leads to an investigation of how these processes may be experienced within an educational setting. Building on the conceptual theoretical development undertaken, we propose a framework of learning activities which may support the development of creativity through either teaching entrepreneurship or teaching entrepreneurially, at primary, secondary and tertiary education levels. A range of different approaches are evaluated according to their relevance to creative and entrepreneurial development processes within a time-constrained curriculum or modular setting including business planning, simulations, roleplay, co-creation and flashmobs. Flashmobs are proposed to be most suitable and an outline learning activity design is mapped in detail against identified creative and entrepreneurial processes. Implications, Value and Originality This paper is innovative in that it develops a unique combined framework of entrepreneurial and creative processes which may support educators and researchers in evaluating how learning activities may directly contribute to students’ learning through personal experience and their development of a creative and entrepreneurial approach to situations. This paper is of value to educators looking to either teach entrepreneurship or lead entrepreneurial courses in that it explains how creative and entrepreneurial processes may be experienced through different forms of learning activity. It is of further value to research on entrepreneurial learning in considering how the creative process may inform entrepreneurial action. Keywords: Creativity; Entrepreneurship; Cognition; Sensemaking; Education; Flashmob