Integrating Innovation and Entrepreneurship into Curriculum Development within the Nigerian University System Using the University Co-Creation/Innovation Hub (U-COHUB) Model

Curriculum Development is the multi-step process of creating and improving a course taught at a school or university, with the aim of achieving improvement. Entrepreneurship is a relatively new tool for solving the dynamic needs of people in different nations of the world. It is an instrument to create more jobs and reduce the rate of unemployment. Studies have shown that the university curriculum in Africa (in context, Nigeria) seems to produce graduates that have very good cognitive and theoretical knowledge but less applied knowledge, especially in innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E), hence creating a wide gap between the university curriculum and the practice of I&E. The Nigerian National Universities Commission (NUC) Benchmark Minimum Academic Standard (BMAS) and the present NUC Core Curriculum Minimum Academic Standard (CCMAS) provide insufficient guidelines in the curriculum to cover the required experiential elements demanded for I&E. Unfortunately, the current unemployment rate in Nigeria flows from lack of transformational I&E. The aim of this study was, therefore, to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the university curriculum in terms of embedding, maintaining, and improving the content and practice of I&E across all programmes within the university, with a view to using the knowledge obtained from the study to create a solution for better integration of I&E into the university curriculum. We carried out the study using a target population that comprised 300 selected students from three universities in Ondo State, Nigeria. We administered open-ended questions, and there were 297 respondents (response rate was 99%). Descriptive analysis of the data demonstrated that most of the university students did not believe they possessed any appreciable innovative skills, despite their innate entrepreneurial skills. The research concludes that there is clearly a need for the augmentation of the university curriculum with I&E aspects that are missing. To address this gap, we present the establishment of the University Co-creation/Innovation Hub (U-COHUB) in the Nigerian university system. U-COHUB has been designed to empower undergraduates with skills, mentorship, wide-ranging opportunities, and technical support to become providers of solutions to social and real-life problems.