Cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset in students is crucial to encouraging innovation and creativity. By exposing students to entrepreneurial concepts and opportunities, you will empower them think criticallysolves problems and takes initiative. This commitment not only prepares students to be dynamic in the workforce, but equips them with skills to start their own enterprises and create successful futures.

At Cardiff Metropolitan University, entrepreneurship is embedded within us learning, teaching and student engagement strategy. All academic programs embrace Cardiff met EDGEwhich exposes students to ethical, digital, global and entrepreneurial opportunities.

We define entrepreneurship using The European Competence Framework for Entrepreneurship (EntreComp) which highlights 15 key skills that foster an entrepreneurial mindset. All programs and activities are mapped onto this framework to ensure our community of learners develop a wide range of key skills.

Engaging, empowering and equipping students

Our support is aligned with that of the Welsh Government Youth Entrepreneurship Strategy (YES) which focuses on three themes; staffed, empowered and equipped. We provide activity at every level to ensure there is appropriate support for each individual at every stage of their entrepreneurial journey. ‘Engage’ involves light engagement activities such as information stands, conferences and networking events, ’empower’ focuses on developing key enterprise skills – for example through our weekly workshops covering topics such as founder funding or start-up a company. small businesses, while ‘team’ level support is suitable for our students who are actively in the process of launching a business and includes one-to-one business advice meetings, business bootcamps and trading opportunity testing .

In addition to this pathway, we regularly collect feedback from the student body about what we offer, what students would like to see in the future, and what subjects or skills they feel they could improve, so that we can ensure that our offering responds their needs.

Provisions for the curriculum

With an engaged body of academic staff, the Cardiff Met Center for Entrepreneurship is regularly called upon to provide specialist support and deliver a range of workshops which act as an ‘off the shelf’ framework, tailored to the subject required and delivered at an academic level suitable. Topics include developing an entrepreneurial mindset, an entrepreneurial approach to the world, sustainable futures, networking, presentation skills and more.

The success of our efforts regularly leads to requests to collaborate on live module briefs to provide real-world practical experience, as demonstrated by Cardiff Met MSc Marketing students receiving real social media consultancy briefs from our alumni startup network to be part of their evaluation. .

Enterprises and the entrepreneurial community

Our new enterprise and entrepreneurship community brings together staff interested in further developing their enterprise education knowledge. Promoted and supported by our quality improvement direction, the initiative aims to support colleges to nurture their entrepreneurial capacity and student know-how. Quarterly events feature short presentations from academics who are currently incorporating enterprise or entrepreneurship into their curricula to share best practices with others who are in turn beginning to consider entrepreneurship education in their teaching. This focus allows more colleagues to connect with the agenda through the lens of their discipline. The community also has a virtual channel where members can collectively share practices, case studies, external publications and learnings related to enterprise education.

Top tips for cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset

• Getting the wording right is key: Sometimes students see the word entrepreneurship and stop because they think starting a business isn’t for them. We emphasize time and time again that entrepreneurial skills are for everyone, regardless of their career path. For example, we run a weekly “curious about…” workshop series that sparks curiosity and exploration, teaching entrepreneurial skills without explicitly mentioning business or entrepreneurship.
• Make your workshops as practical and fun as possible: create interactive and engaging sessions which might at first seem unrelated to entrepreneurship, then illustrate and explain what entrepreneurial skills they have learned from them and how this benefits them.
• Try to ‘plant the seed’ as early as possible with light-touch entrepreneurial skills sessions at Level 4, then improve these at Levels 5 and 6: being consistent with delivery and hitting as many touch points as possible will help students to open their eyes to the potential of newly acquired entrepreneurial skills.
• Embrace collaboration: Find and connect with students and faculty who are passionate about and interested in entrepreneurship to facilitate collaborations. As a result of these collaborations, you can showcase the impact you’ve had and spread it to the rest of the student and academic communities.

We understand the fortunate position we are in at Cardiff Met’s Center for Entrepreneurship in that we have a dedicated team, alongside the support of our university-wide strategy. It allows us to try things, change direction and take risks to ensure we always deliver the best value to our students.

For those wondering how these strategies can be applied with different resources, start somewhere and start small. Adapt and embrace your own entrepreneurial qualities to become a catalyst for building them in your students.

Isabelle Ford and Hannah Willis are enterprise champions at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Center for Entrepreneurship.

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Cardiff Metropolitan University is shortlisted for Outstanding Entrepreneurial University TO Times Higher Education Awards 2024 #THEAwards. A full list of shortlisted candidates can be found here.