Changing students mindset towards entrepreneurship with experiential learning: Experience from Peru

This article reports on an experiential learning experiment conducted among MBA students at the Universidad del Pacifico, Lima, Peru in 2012. Student groups of 3 to 5 people were given the task to create an entrepreneurial business with a CSR twist within 7 days. 20 Soles, approximately $7 seedbed funding, were provided for each group. A group of 120 students participated in the learning experiment, a control group of 67 students just followed the traditional, case-based, course teaching about CSR and entrepreneurship. A baseline survey as well as post-course/experiment investigation were complemented by a follow-up meeting with the students. The underlying aim was to see the effect of experiential learning on students´ entrepreneurial mindset. After stating that experiential learning had a higher impact on the intention to start a business we constructed a survey, based on Alain Gibb’s work on entrepreneurial behaviours, entrepreneurial values, entrepreneurial competencies and entrepreneurial outcomes, to understand what factors could have influenced students to change their mind from willing to work in a multinational company to wanting to become entrepreneurs. We built a Probit model to analyse which factors can help understand changes in entrepreneurial intention of the student learners. The quantitative data analysis showed that the experiential learning experiment triggered a change in the entrepreneurial intention of the MBA students and raised significant awareness of their intrinsic entrepreneurial qualities.