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This chapter introduces the content of the book, presenting the key insights from the contributed chapters.

This chapter analyzes how entrepreneurs of a same district, thus dealing with similar sets of resources and accesses to market, respond to innovation pressure. Spread over five-year period from 2010 to 2014, this is a longitudinal qualitative multiple case studies conducted in Italy’s Prato textile district, near Florence. The authors adopted a content analysis to reconstruct the perceptions about innovation trajectories adopted by a sample of entrepreneurs. Our findings show that despite equal pre-conditions, we observe firms evolving differently due to their approach to pursing opportunities, based on network configurations and cognitive interpretations of internal support for implementation. This chapter develops an interpretation of the findings adopting a framework based on the effect of strong and weak ties and a cognitive approach based on an effectual or causal entrepreneurial decision-making.

The types of employability skills and how to infuse employability skills into education is increasingly clear in theory, but in practice, these are proving difficult for the higher education (HE) system in developing countries. A key question is why and how can HE system focus on graduate outcomes? It could be argued that the African debilitating unemployment crisis has been mainly because of the low levels of skills and low standard of education. Building on ‘postcolonial theory’, this chapter focuses on graduate outcomes to examine the current unemployment situation in Africa, causes and solutions to the challenges. By exploring issues related to over-reliance on outdated curriculum, poor teaching pedagogy, low government expenditure on education and ineffective education policies, we hope to contribute to the knowledge of ways to improve HE, labour force and sustainable development. This conceptual contribution argues that HE policies focus should be on skills development, vocational education, digital innovations and less emphasises on degree qualifications.

Research on sojourn experiences appears to indicate that temporarily living abroad interrupts and redirects peoples’ cultural identity as they negotiate and shift their identities to better fit with the new environment within which they are operating (Dickens, Womack, & Dimes, 2019; Zhang & Xaio, 2021). In this chapter, a biographical reflexivity lens is used to explore events that were captured from a living abroad life: firstly, as an international student from mainland China attending university in the UK, and secondly as an international academic following a move from being a student to being a full-time member of the teaching staff at the same university. The shifting of my cultural identity to one more reflective of those found in my host country was subtle, and one which I was not conscious of until challenges by Chinese students provoked reflection about my ‘Chineseness’ since they had expected me to conform to their understanding of Chinese ways of teaching with its emphasis on rote learning and memorisation (Ai & Wang, 2017; Wang, 2018). Where ‘I’ is used in the chapter, it refers to the first author whose experience forms the basis for the chapter.

Our higher education cohorts are becoming increasingly diverse. Providing beneficial formative and summative feedback for highly diverse groups of students is difficult. Three key aspects of the feedback process are required to ensure benefits: (i) suitable feedback components; (ii) suitable embedding of feedback in the learning context; and (iii) active engagement in the feedback process. In order to explore these three aspects, this chapter investigates: (a) relevant literature; (b) learning and teaching activities in Warwick Business School’s Distance Learning MBA; and (c) data from an internal committee report that presented the NVivo-processed findings of a review of 173 DLMBA students’ reflections on impactful feedback. The observations and recommendations given here reveal insights that can be applied to other student groups beyond the MBA sphere and ensure an impactful learning and teaching experience for all stakeholders. Thus, the purpose of the chapter is to assist colleagues and students in engaging more fruitfully in feedback processes and in adding tried and tested approaches to their learning and teaching repertoires.

Authentic learning or learning by doing involves real-world problems and their solutions using role-play, problem-based actions, case studies, and engagement with communities of practice in a multicultural environment by its very nature (Lombardi, 2007). Authentic learning will be explored through the lenses of an international postgraduate programme in International Tourism Management and mainly through a module that is team coached and underpins the degree. The reflective chapter examines two journeys: (i) master students who take ownership of their learning in a team setting environment; and (ii) tutor/s who take the role of team coach and facilitate student’s abilities to self-manage and take responsibility of their own learning and development. The journey is discussed from the perspective and characteristics of authentic learning activities employed in the design, implementation, and assessment of the module and, overall, the postgraduate programme. Drawing on the experiences of authentic activities presented, learnings can be applied to various modules and degrees given the broad context of tourism in a global context.

Entrepreneurship educators have recently employed various computer- and game-based teaching methods to develop students’ entrepreneurship knowledge and competencies. However, our understanding of the learning outcomes (LOs) of such methods for students and specifically gamification teaching techniques is fragmented and underdeveloped. This chapter aimed to narrow the gap by systematically analyzing the peer-reviewed empirical studies on gamification and students’ entrepreneurship LOs (ELOs).

This study employed the systematic literature review method to examine the papers on the intersection between gamification and entrepreneurship education (EE). Some of 80 papers were retrieved from Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus databases and 16 papers were included in the final analysis. The papers were analyzed based on the key LOs that teaching entrepreneurship using gamification have for students.

This study found limited literature on the interrelationship between gamification and students’ ELOs. The majority of these studies suggested a positive association between gamification and students’ ELOs. These ELOs were classified into four key groups including cognitive, behavioral, social/interpersonal and skill-based LOs. This analysis explored the huge gap in empirical studies on the impact of gamification on students’ ELOs.

This exploratory study is limited to the systematic review of the empirical researches published in scientific journals. Of the numerous game-based and simulation teaching methods, this systematic analysis focused on gamification and its effects on cultivating entrepreneurial knowledge and competencies in students. Future studies should include published and unpublished papers in other sources (such as books, book chapters, working papers and theses) and other types of technology-based entrepreneurship teaching methods.

Educators and computer-based game designers may use the findings of this study to improve the effectiveness of gamified EE and training programs by connecting the objectives and content of the programs to students’ ELOs and examining if the programs create the intended ELOs in students.

This chapter is one of the first attempts that examines students’ LOs of gamification in EE. This chapter contributes to the limited validated knowledge and understanding of the impact of gamification on ELOs of students.