After nearly three years our project team successfully completed the Cross-Cultural Skills Europe (CRUSE) project. Despite challenges posed by the pandemic, some great outputs were produced which can be viewed on the project website and video and narrated case studies are hosted on the projects YouTube channel. The case studies and supporting materials covered some fascinating topics and included some interesting and iconic organisations, which has led to positive feedback and a positive final project evaluation.
2020 Emerald Literati Awards
This morning I received a pleasant surprise to discover that a paper I published with colleagues had received an award. ‘The Father’s Role in Supporting the Son’s Business Knowledge Development Process in Vietnamese Family Businesses’, published in the Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, had been selected as a Highly Commended Paper in the 2020 Emerald Literati Awards.
I received a similar award in the 2017 Emerald Literati Awards for ‘Unpacking the link between Entrepreneurialism and Employability: An assessment of the relationship between entrepreneurial attitudes and likelihood of graduate employment in a professional field’, published in Education + Training. It is always nice to know that others consider your work to be of value and interest, and the paper has now been made freely available for six months.
2020 Emerald Literati Awards
EU CRUZE Project
In March, I led a team to submit an EU Erasmus KA2 project bid. The bid was a revised version of a bid submitted the previous year that narrowly missed out on funding. Against this backdrop, it make sense to revise and resubmit. After a month’s delay in announcing the funding of project, we received the good news that our project would be funded. Under my leadership, the University of Worcester will manage the project, working with partners from London, Belgium, Sweden and Turkey to develop tailored cross cultural training materials to support the development of learners cross cultural skills in both higher education and industry.
The project aims to develop the intercultural competencies of graduates in Europe by enhancing the quality and relevance of their skills to enable them to be active professionals in the European working environment. The project investigates the perceived and actual intercultural competencies of graduates needed by employers and subsequently provides outputs that help address these needs. The project responds to the European Commission’s (EC) Strategic Framework – Education & Training 2020 view that there has been a lack of focus on the involvement of social institutions on the cross-cultural skill-needs that companies have and on the effectiveness of investment in education and training in this area on business productivity.
The outputs of the project will include:
- A Competencies and Skills Report, which will highlight the intercultural skills needed by employers and highlight gaps in current student competencies;
- A Cross-cultural Competencies and Skills Development Toolkit, which will include a range of case studies and teaching materials;
- A Cross-cultural Competencies and Skills Development Training Manual, which will explain how educators can effectively utilize the teaching materials. The outputs will all be open-access.
As the output from the project are complete, I hope to share links to them via my blog and website, so stay tuned for my information.
National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant
The new academic year started with confirmation of receiving funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China for a project titled ‘Researching the Effectiveness of Entrepreneurial Education in HEI’S: Measurement, mechanism and contextual factors’ (71974093). The project is being led by Dr Junhua Sun from Nanjing University, who I have previously worked with as part of a similar project researching how inspiration and educational characteristics moderate the relationship between entrepreneurship education and the development of an entrepreneurial mindset. I am acting as a foreign expert on the new project and am looking forward to getting involved and supporting the research.
Huddersfield PhD Graduation
After completing my education thesis and defending it early in the year, the chance to reflect and celebrate at graduation had come around. I made the decision several years before to undertake a PhD in education at the University of Huddersfield, to learn more about educational theory and support my pedagogical practice. Whilst, it is important to be in an expert in your subject area, being able to educate and transfer learning in an effective manner is also important. Learning more about education also supported and led me to develop my research focus in entrepreneurship education, allowing me to bring two of my research interests together. I was thankful to receive support and funding from a State Department Professional Development Fellowship to help make studying the program a reality.
The graduation ceremony was held on campus in St. Paul’s Hall and my wife and parents attended with me. The event was short and uplifting and offered a final chance to explore Huddersfield, a town which I had never visited before I started studying on the program. But over the course of the last couple of years I had become increasingly familiar with the town and have developed an affinity with many of its quirks and venues.
Robin Goes to Hollywood: The USASBE 2018 Conference
I have just returned from the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) conference in Los Angles. The conference was held at the Lowes Hollywood hotel and ran over four days. The focus of the conference had been adjusted from being focused on research, to be having an increased focus on entrepreneurship education. This mix of an educational and research focus, made the conference very interesting. So I decided I would attend for my first time. It was also my first time visiting LA, so it made attending the conference even more interesting. I was presenting a developmental paper entitled ‘Challenges to Implementing Experiential Entrepreneurship Education in China’. The paper was based on a reflection of the challenges I have previously faced when trying to implement experiential curricular in China. The conference had a range of tracks and sessions, including tracks of experiential activities. I focused my attendance and participation on the experiential activity sessions as unfortunately it was not possible to attend everything. The conference venue was on Hollywood Boulevard, which gave me the opportunity to walk up and down Hollywood Boulevard several times each day and experience the atmosphere of Hollywood. I also had half a day free to walk up to the Griffith Observatory and get a view over LA.
China National Social Science Funding for Enterprise Education Research
Last week I found out that a project I am involved with was successful in bidding for ¥180,000 of funding from the China National Social Science Fund for Education. The funding will support a three-year investigation into the impact of entrepreneurship education on the entrepreneurial mindset of undergraduates in China. The project is led by Jun Cun from the Southeast University in Nanjing and I will be involved as a foreign expert.
Jun is currently finishing a visiting research role at the University of Oxford, so we were able to meet up in Worcester to discuss the start of the project in person before he returned to China. I am looking forward to being involved in the project and disseminating the results in the coming years. The funding will help to support the collection of a large and comprehensive dataset, to further explore this relatively under researched topic.
Emerald Literati Network Awards: Highly Commended Paper
I was delighted to find out on Friday that my paper ‘Unpacking the link between entrepreneurialism and employability‘ published in Education + Training was identified as a highly commended paper (joint runner up) in the Outstanding Paper category of the 2017 Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. The paper will now be open and free for everyone to access and view until June 2018.
The paper is the first attempt (that I am aware of) to quantitatively link entrepreneurship/enterprise attributes to graduate employability. I think this offers a contribution to help move the field forward. The findings help to underline the argument that some entrepreneurship and enterprise education is important for everyone, not just those considering setting up a business. But entrepreneurship and enterprise education can help to secure employment in a professional or managerial field, which are often seen as a graduate level roles. A simple overview of the paper and its findings, along with a infographic can be found here.
ICSB 2017 All Booked
Conference booking seasons continues. I am delighted that my paper has been accepted for the International Council for Small Business World Conference in Argentina. The paper is focused on the perceived entrepreneurial attitudes and characteristics entrepreneurs think are required during the business start-up phase. The paper was submitted to the ‘Methodological challenges and new research methods applied to SME and Entrepreneurship research’ stream, which gave me the chance to learn and play with a new methodology.
British Council UK-China Funding
This week we found out that we had been successful in securing funding from the British Council’s UK-China Enhancing Graduate Employability and Entrepreneurship fund. I am the lead and principle researchers for the project, which will be a collaborative project between the University of Worcester and Beijing Foreign Studies University. The project will interview 10 UK and 10 Chinese entrepreneurs to make video case studies and innovative teaching material. The case studies will focus on innovation and the business models developed by UK and Chinese entrepreneurs, as well as the differences in business culture. Interviews for research will also be conducted with the entrepreneur’s to support comparative entrepreneurship research.
Robin Bell 