Developing Entrepreneur Capacities Through Higher Education: Learning For Value Creation

Abstract

In the past two decades, Pakistan had witnessed a whopping rise in number of university enrollments and graduates. Due to lack of absorptive capacity in job market, the importance of entrepreneurship education has been felt more than ever. The focus of this dissertation is to use curriculum laden value creation as a stepping stone to introduce entrepreneurship into universities to o set the e ects credential creep and rising unemployment levels. This issue had been paid scant attention in Pakistani context, which makes it enticing to investigate entrepreneurship as value creation through university based curriculum. The research espouses a qualitative approach to achieve exploratory purpose of research questions through in-depth interviews. Overall, 31 interviews were conducted in full- edged second phase while 06 interviews were done in pilot phase. In absence of a-priori theories, grounded theory is chosen as strategy of inquiry. The analysis is carried out in three phases of open, axial and selective coding with point of theoretical saturation unfolding at 26th interview. The analysis indicates that a social vacuum exists due to prevalent industry and academic dichotomies. It has been learnt that informal learning is important while a wide gulf is ominous in the shape of discrepancies in regards to psychological, managerial and opportunity recognition strategies taught in universities against business practices in vogue. The ndings reveal unstitched academic-industry linkages, silo and immature conduct of operations has long term implications for innovation ecosystem of Peshawar. The misalignment between university and industry manifests itself in paradox expectations where student lament lack of jobs, while industry voices concerns over shortage of talent. Moreover, the societal narrative and discourse is highly inclined to degree as against knowledge seeking. The study concluded that universities in Peshawar are mere teaching universities giving no inputs to government in form of products, processes or policies. The study contributes to practice of understanding a social process of interest by proposing a three-tier, bidirectional framework with paths to infuse entrepreneurship in curriculum on micro, macro and meso levels. On theoretical levels, it extends the existing model on entrepreneurial process through integration of curricular, co and extra-curricular activities to better learn for value creation.