Fostering students’ competence in identifying business opportunities in entrepreneurship education

Opportunity identification and, in particular, the generation of new business ideas is becoming an important element of entrepreneurship education. Researchers and educators, however, struggle with how opportunity identification competence can be enhanced. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to test the ability of students to generate new business opportunities when they participated in a redesigned entrepreneurship course with specially developed creativity exercises. Pre- vs. post-test comparisons showed the students who followed the course to subsequently have a higher level of divergent thinking, also with respect to the students who did not enrol in the course. The results also indicate that the course has a significant effect on the students’ abilities to generate a greater number and more innovative business ideas in the experimental group; while the control group showed no significant changes in business idea generation. The implications of the results for developing opportunity identification competence and entrepreneurship education are presented.