Let the cat out of the bag: a critical incident analysis of teaching entrepreneurship competencies from the teachers’ perspective

This study proposes the Critical Incident Technique as an empirical tool to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching entrepreneurship competencies within entrepreneurship courses by using the Comprehensive Entrepreneurship Competence Model as a theoretical framework. The study focuses on the perceptions and experiences of 15 teachers who introduced in parallel, during two semesters in 2022, the same teaching approach in 39 entrepreneurship courses offered in 5 universities in Estonia, Finland, Italy, Poland, and Portugal. The teachers were asked to describe in detail specific incidents encountered during their teaching experience, without any cognitive filter represented by pre-established items, categories, and elements of evaluation of the teaching process. Then, the incidents were sorted into categories based on similarities in the content and classified as relating to positive and negative outcomes. Our findings contribute to the design of new educational programmes aiming at fostering students’ entrepreneurship competencies, showing peculiarities that need to be considered. Moreover, the study emphasizes the importance of using a range of evaluation approaches when testing a new method and suggests that exploring the teaching process, in addition to learning outcomes, can provide useful insights to inform the design of the teaching.