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- Lockett, Nigel, et al.
(författare)
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The Bermuda Triangle in Entrepreneurship Education: The Role of Social Capital in Entrepreneurial Learning
- 2015
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Ingår i: Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship; November 11-12, Glasgow, Scotland.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objectives. We aim to explore the relationship between the role of social capital and entrepreneurial learning by investigating the entrepreneurial journey of student and graduate entrepreneurs.Prior Work. It is widely acknowledged that the most powerful resource of an entrepreneur is their network: individuals, groups or organisations that support, advice and even finance an entrepreneur’s growth. Because of this, entrepreneurship education programmes have been using entrepreneurs to connect students to the ‘real world’, providing them an initial network of entrepreneurs and the skills to develop their own network. Nonetheless, the real impact of networking on students learning has not yet been fully explored.Approach. This qualitative study uses unstructured interviews with three student and graduate entrepreneurs at both the University of Leeds and Chalmers University of Technology. Interviews focused on understanding the six entrepreneurs’ journey through entrepreneurial activities (critical incidents) and how social networks influenced these activities; interviewees were asked to reflect on their entrepreneurial journey, covering secondary school, university, post-university and expectations for the immediate future.Results. Main findings evidenced that the UK three entrepreneurs started to show some kind of entrepreneurial behaviour during secondary school education. All respondents though increased their network awareness through their entrepreneurial journey: from “don’t know” to “know” to “need”. Moreover, at the beginning the network was mostly informal (family and friends), becoming more formal according to the increased complexity of the entrepreneurial activity. During their entrepreneurial journey, interviewees agreed that at the beginning nobody taught them how to be entrepreneur or even the skills they needed to carry on the entrepreneurial activity. But once their journey became more complex and serious, they needed skills and knowledge that they were not able to develop by their own; in that moment entrepreneurs realised that their network could provide them with people from who learn new capabilities, using informal learning processes to close the gap between their scarcities and needs.Implications. The study exposes that networks facilitate entrepreneurial learning through informal learning processes which need to be translated into entrepreneurship education in a higher education context. One way is to legitimise social networking activities within the university environment, while another is embedding social networking into formal and non-formal entrepreneurship education.Value. Social networking is not simply building a contact list; it is part of the social capital needed to help the entrepreneurial journey. This study exposes the previously missing value of social networking and encourages educators to embed activities within the curriculum that facilitate students’ informal learning.
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| 2. |
- Malhi, Yadvinder, et al.
(författare)
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The linkages between photosynthesis, productivity, growth and biomass in lowland Amazonian forests
- 2015
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Ingår i: Global Change Biology. - : Wiley. - 1354-1013. ; 21:6, s. 2283-2295
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Understanding the relationship between photosynthesis, net primary productivity and growth in forest ecosystems is key to understanding how these ecosystems will respond to global anthropogenic change, yet the linkages among these components are rarely explored in detail. We provide the first comprehensive description of the productivity, respiration and carbon allocation of contrasting lowland Amazonian forests spanning gradients in seasonal water deficit and soil fertility. Using the largest data set assembled to date, ten sites in three countries all studied with a standardized methodology, we find that (i) gross primary productivity (GPP) has a simple relationship with seasonal water deficit, but that (ii) site-to-site variations in GPP have little power in explaining site-to-site spatial variations in net primary productivity (NPP) or growth because of concomitant changes in carbon use efficiency (CUE), and conversely, the woody growth rate of a tropical forest is a very poor proxy for its productivity. Moreover, (iii) spatial patterns of biomass are much more driven by patterns of residence times (i.e. tree mortality rates) than by spatial variation in productivity or tree growth. Current theory and models of tropical forest carbon cycling under projected scenarios of global atmospheric change can benefit from advancing beyond a focus on GPP. By improving our understanding of poorly understood processes such as CUE, NPP allocation and biomass turnover times, we can provide more complete and mechanistic approaches to linking climate and tropical forest carbon cycling.
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