Reframing education: Mindset as the bridge from learning to action
By: John Hornby – Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Hotel Management School Leeuwarden and PhD candidate at Oxford Brookes University (UK)
What does it take for education to truly prepare students for the uncertainty and complexity of entrepreneurial life? The answer emerging from recent doctoral research is clear: education on its own is not enough. Without building the right mindset, even the best-designed curriculum will fall short.
A Pathway, Not a Shortcut
This study, recognised by the CHME 2025 Best Paper Award, reveals that authenticity, collaboration, and reflection aren’t the end goal—they are the starting point. These educational elements don’t directly lead to students becoming entrepreneurs. Instead, they serve as catalysts, setting students on a developmental path toward forming an entrepreneurial mindset. It’s this mindset—defined by traits like creative problem-solving, focused adaptability, resourcefulness, and the ability to execute and mobilise others—that ultimately drives the intention to act.
Mindset: The Missing Link
The entrepreneurial mindset isn’t a personality type. It’s a structured way of thinking and acting, shaped by experience and nurtured through reflection, collaboration, and meaningful challenges. The research shows that the mindset develops through these experiences—when they’re well-designed—and forms the psychological bridge between what students learn and what they do with it.
The study found that:
– Reflection and collaboration consistently help shape mindset, especially when structured.
– Authenticity, while important, needs careful scaffolding to avoid confusion or disengagement.
– Without mindset, learning activities often fail to translate into intentions or action.
Designing Education for Impact
To be effective, education must be purposefully designed to shape the entrepreneurial mindset—not just deliver knowledge. That means embedding skills and mindset traits directly into learning outcomes, tracking development over time, and tailoring approaches based on factors like gender, age, course discipline, and work experience. Students are not all the same—and neither are the ways they learn.
This research, carried out at the Hotel Management School Leeuwarden in collaboration with the Centre for Entrepreneurship, is pioneering in both its scope and practical relevance. It contributes not only to academic debate, but also to the region’s goal of fostering innovation and resilience through education.
Assessment, Alignment, and the Role of Skills
An often-overlooked aspect of entrepreneurship education is how learning is assessed. To truly support the development of an entrepreneurial mindset, educational programmes must be built on strong constructive alignment. This means ensuring that learning outcomes (LOs), teaching activities, and assessments are all explicitly connected and coherent.
Clear and well-formulated learning outcomes provide the foundation for this alignment. They help students understand what is expected and why it matters. When learning outcomes are vague or overly general, students may struggle to connect their learning to practical action—or worse, may not understand the value of the task at all.
A compelling case can be made for using skills—particularly those linked to the entrepreneurial mindset—as key indicators of learning mastery. Skills such as creative problem-solving, resource mobilisation, networking, and reflective thinking are not only measurable but also directly relevant to professional practice. By embedding these into both the LOs and the assessment framework, educators can ensure that students develop real-world capabilities, not just abstract knowledge.
Assessment strategies must therefore move beyond simple content recall and focus on performance, application, and growth. Portfolios, peer reviews, live case evaluations, and reflective journals offer robust, formative ways to assess how well students are internalising and applying entrepreneurial skills.
