University of Huddersfield: Entrepreneurship Education Across All Schools and How to Teach the Teachers

EE at the University of Huddersfield (UoH) combines strong profiles in curricula offers, extra-curricular activities and organizational set-up. The UoH is one of a few UK universities to offer new venture creation degrees: the UoH’s Business School offers bachelor, masters, and doctoral degrees involving to start an enterprise. However, the most striking characteristic of EE at the UoH may be that EE teaching is “everyone’s responsibility”. Embedded EE is offered in all of the university’s seven academic Schools. The UoH’s strategy provides that by 2018 each student is to encounter EE in his or her study. This approach is enabled by a concept that does not only promote “entrepreneurship” as starting a business but also, more generally, “enterprising” as making ideas happen. The UoH also offers major extra-curricular EE activities, mainly through the UoH’s Enterprise Team but also activities by teachers from various schools. As regards organizational set-up of EE, there is strong support from the university’s management. The Vice Chancellor put in place a supportive infrastructure with the appointments of a Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, a Director of Research and Enterprise, and a Head of Enterprise. The UoH’s Enterprise Team unit is an important element in the UoH’s EE approach. The Enterprise Team helps UoH students and graduates start their business and it encourages and supports teachers especially from non-business Schools to teach entrepreneurship themselves. Moreover, entrepreneurs and businesses contribute to the design of the curriculum and help support students in many ways. While some EE activities are co-funded by the national government and the EU, the UoH’s EE profile may largely be due to leadership that other universities could emulate fairly easily.