Interdisciplinarity in Entrepreneurship Education: A Conceptual Framework Focusing on Pedagogy for Innovation

This paper articulates a conceptual framework for exploring how interdisciplinarity connects with entrepreneurship education. The framework offered in this paper links the themes of entrepreneurship, innovation and pedagogy together with a focus on exploring how interdisciplinary methods of teaching can support educational outcomes in entrepreneurship education. Based on the on-going research conducted within the LAB research group at the Oulu University of Applied Sciences in Finland, this conceptual paper summarizes and integrates relevant concepts to construct a theoretical grounding for entrepreneurship education that targets innovation and real-world business development (Potter, 2008). Specifically, this framework draws upon existing concepts such as project-based learning (Blumenfeld et al, 1991), self-regulated learning (Winne, 2010) and expands upon current directions in interdisciplinary education (Lattuca, Voigt and Fath, 2004) to describe pedagogical foundations that point toward interdisciplinary methods as a support for entrepreneurship education at the higher education level. In addition, the concepts discussed are linked to interdisciplinary practices at the Oulu University of Applied Sciences LAB pre-incubator programs as an example to demonstrate how this framework can be used to research educational outcomes in practice.