How to design learning tools that entrepreneurs actually use?

Abstract

Entrepreneurship, as a driver of economic growth, involves identifying opportunities and creating ventures. However, the success rate of startups is significantly low, with various sources reporting different failure rates. Common reasons for startup failure include lack of market need, insufficient funds, inadequate team, strong competition and pricing/cost issues. Scholars and practitioners have developed numerous theories and tools to assist entrepreneurs, such as the Value Proposition Canvas, Lean Startup and Customer Development. Despite these efforts, the failure rate of startups remains high, raising doubts about the effectiveness of existing tools.
To improve the success rate of startups, academic research could be used. However within entrepreneurship, academic research becomes detached from practical relevance. This is an issue described in academic literature as the ‘Research-Practice Gap’. To address this gap, a “third body” or “design” is proposed as a mediating factor between research and practice. This design could offer prescriptive principles and tools that are useful for entrepreneurs. Currently, such designs are predominantly created by reflective practitioners rather than scholars. This offers certain problems in practice, such as their lack of rigor, limited generalizability, bias and subjectivity and finally lack of theoretical grounding.
This thesis aims to provide scholars with knowledge how to create learning tools that entrepreneurs actually use. As a result, scholars are able to covert their academic papers into desirable action-oriented learning tools. The first part of this thesis analyses this research-practice gap in three ways. First, it conducts a literature research of relevant literature in the domain of learning within entrepreneurship. Second, it researches the perspective of entrepreneurs on the gap by using a qualitative research study. Finally, the author dives into the role of an entrepreneur by solving a case-study for Stippl. This reveals a first-person perspective into the research-practice gap. The conclusions of these three research methods are combined into 4 important elements to implement when creating a learning tool for entrepreneurs.
The second part of this thesis converts the analysis into a product to use for scholars. This product does not only provide insights of the analysis, but it also supports scholars in using the important elements within their learning tool. In this part, the thesis identifies the necessary requirements for the product and creates three concept ideas. These concept ideas are tested with scholars to create one final product which implements the 4 important elements for scholars to create relevant learning tools.
This thesis aims to provide scholars with the necessary knowledge to create relevant learning tools. The ultimate goal is to improve the success rate of startups by providing entrepreneurs with desirable and relevant knowledge.