Author(s): Verena Liszt-Rohlf, Brigitte G Halbfas, Alexandra Baldwin
Entrepreneurship education researchers consider decision-making an essential competence for entrepreneurs and have repeatedly pointed out that decision-making competences impact business success and performance. Starting from the premise that these competences are essential, the question arises how teaching entrepreneurial decision-making requires certain approaches to parse out two distinct logics and describes how the authors discovered this. Current definitions accept tying teachability to observability. The present paper investigates observability and teachability in teaching modes in entrepreneurship education at the University of Kassel, Germany, Europe. The research team conducted an empirical study with 63 MBA students who tested various teaching modes and wrote think-aloud protocols that formed the basis for content analysis. The findings reveal complex yet comprehensive approaches to ways in which to teach and learn decision-making in a founder-centered environment. The results exemplify numerous decision-making situations and showcase applications of causal and effectual decision logics. This allowed the authors to derive criteria that could serve as a starting point for planning teaching modes based on the model and propositions derived from the presented findings.