ENTREPRENEUR HANDBOOK

No Result
View All Result
  • Finance
  • Technology
  • Marketing
  • Human Resources
  • Insurance
  • Legal
  • Procurement
  • eCommerce
  • Leadership
Advertisement
ENTREPRENEUR HANDBOOK
No Result
View All Result
ENTREPRENEUR HANDBOOK
No Result
View All Result
Human resources

Postgraduate researchers are emerging in the UK

Discover how the amount of postgraduate researchers into entrepreneurship is growing in the UK and how it affects you

By Dave Jarman | Updated July 27, 2021 (Published 20/11/2013)

Related posts

  • Top 100 asset finance companies & providers for UK businesses
  • 90 Top commercial law firms & solicitors in the UK
  • Venture capital firms in the UK & London

Postgraduate researchers are emerging in the UK as a focus for enterprise and entrepreneurship education. This is a response to several themes:

Related posts

Identifying and fixing leaks in your LMS marketing strategy

What is enterprise education and how does it work in the UK?

  • Academia is pretty saturated, so research students increasingly cannot find an academic career path and need to develop alternative career paths.
  • Increasing focus is being put on the UK’s Science and Technology research base to commercialise more discoveries into start-ups and spin-outs. These organisations need skilled researchers and technology-literate staff.
  • The professors who lead the research groups who make these breakthroughs are unlikely to leave the academy, but their researchers might be ideal Chief Technology Officers in the spin-out companies that emerge.
  • Even those researchers who survive in academia are increasingly working with industry and trying to demonstrate the impact of their research – by teaching postgraduates the language of business we make our future professors more innovative and commercially aware.

Little older, only a little wiser

However, I find postgrads more challenging to work with (but more rewarding maybe when it works). They’re only a LITTLE older, only a little LITTLE wiser, but a lot more cynical sometimes!

Maybe it’s not so much their age as the fact that they’ve made a decision to stay on in academia already – dodging the outside world for a few more years. Maybe we’ve already pruned out some of the audience who are more enterprising and are left with those of a more critical mindset? They’re less in need of ‘inspirational’ content, and it’s more about supporting them or challenging them concerning something that has already inspired them.

They’re certainly more focused, which is sometimes a problem when you’re trying to convince them to look up from the lab bench at the wider context of their work. The more fundamental the research, the more difficult it is to convince them that learning about enterprise and entrepreneurship is a valid way to spend their time. That’s partly because they find it challenging to apply those fundamental research ideas to anything immediately practical and actionable – but maybe also a product of working in the abstract.

I should stress that this is as much, if not more, a product of the research environment they’re in as it is any individual bias. Supervisor and peer pressure to get the research done does detract from other options. Likewise, even enterprising academics often share their enterprising activity poorly with their research groups let alone those research supervisors who see enterprise as a 5th column distraction from the real work.

For instance, this Professor, who is very enterprising, confessed he didn’t ever tell his students about it.

Postgraduates do respond well to:

  • Case studies
  • Hard evidence
  • Credible presenters

They are much less tolerant of:

  • Not being an expert
  • The subject/format being at all anecdotal
  • “Hand-waving” and all the other ‘soft’ behaviours and models that non-academics use to teach and facilitate
  • Undergraduates

This forces enterprise educators (a lot of whom are not career academics and approach things with “more energy than preparation”) to reconsider their approach. PGRs often prefer a careful and considered style, and much of what suffices for undergraduates needs re-framing if not rewriting. A clear value proposition to the PG audience, hard evidence and credible speakers (ideally research-active speakers), and a less-is-more sense of really making the most of the time available is key.

I do still find myself sometimes wondering at what point does good academic critical thinking tip over into miserable cynicism and a rude unwillingness to respond positively and creatively, but despite the difficulties, they are worth it when you either make a convert or unearth an existing entre- or intrapreneur and help validate their ambitions.

Related topics

Tags: Business education

Related Posts

Digital marketing

Identifying and fixing leaks in your LMS marketing strategy

Developing a learning management system (LMS) is a potentially lucrative business idea and opportunity. However, just like most other business...

Published by Editorial team
27th March 2021
Read more
Entrepreneurship

What is enterprise education and how does it work in the UK?

When I first encountered enterprise education it was largely a process of education ‘about’ enterprise and entrepreneurship – we were...

Published by Dave Jarman
27th July 2021
Read more
Advertisement
Advertisement
Entrepreneur Handbook

Copyright © 2013 – 2025 Entrepreneur Handbook Ltd. All rights reserved. Registered offices at 20-22 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7GU, UK.

Sections

  • Finance
  • Technology
  • Marketing
  • Human resources
  • Insurance
  • Legal
  • Procurement
  • eCommerce
  • Leadership
  • Luxury
  • Start a business

Information

  • Advertise with us
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms of use
  • Contact us

Copyright © 2013 – 2025 Entrepreneur Handbook Ltd. All rights reserved. Registered offices at 20-22 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7GU, UK.

  • Finance
  • Technology
  • Marketing
  • Human resources
  • Insurance
  • Legal
  • Procurement
  • eCommerce
  • Leadership
  • Advertise with us
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms of use
  • Contact us

Copyright © 2013 - 2025 Entrepreneur Handbook Ltd. All rights reserved. Registered offices at 20-22 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7GU, United Kingdom.