Page - 152 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

When talking about teaching at the university, he called the lectures with 500 students edutainment, which are meant for the superstars, ‘who come and do somethingawesome’, but added, ‘whenyou lookat the learningprocessasawhole, when you learn some tools or skills, then these big lectures are not so optimal choices’. Helping to develop certain skills and entrepreneurial mindset, to learn how to use newand innovative toolswere topics that seemed to be very important for him as he returned to these several times and considered these as the main purpose and role of theuniversity in the twenty-first century.As the same ideas are also found fromFreyandOsborne’s (2013) studies, then the importanceofdigitally minded entrepreneurial people in academic sector cannot be underestimated. Lookingat thewhole learningprocess andhelping students therewas something thatM.H. considered especially relevant for the future: ‘… but what I believe that may emerge is the personal learning cloud and big qualitative change in online courses, that are not courses any more, but learning paths’. The importance of life-long learning and university’s role facilitating the process was another topic that was repeated several times: ‘… and the new role of the university is being a place where people do these things which aremore efficient done as face-to-face, where someone helps when one is stuck. Thus it’s possible to ask either from the fellow student or from a faculty member.’ (see also Hill et al. 2015).M.H. views faculty members as facilitators, mentors, who help the students to achieve their purposes, and who need to be present when students need help, in most cases in teams and sometimes also individually. ‘… it’s is more like a mentor—student relationship and the traditional belief, that a faculty member is the most knowl- edgeable person is outdated today. A faculty member should help students to achieve theirpurposesandcansuggestwhat skills areneededand inwhichorder’. Turning their head towards customers (as also discussed by Tolboom 2016; Ilmarinen andKoskela 2015; Edelman 2010), creating a supporting infrastructure (Matt et al. 2015) and encouraging atmosphere for recognising opportunities and taking risks (Koe et al. 2012) and developing entrepreneurial mindset have been alsoconsidered significantduring transformationprocesses.According toM.H., the digitalisation transformation activities are directly related to the investmentsmade into the infrastructure andproviding new spaceswhere students canwork in teams (either in real life or by using new digital tools and solutions) on the assignments faculty members have given them. ‘…this (our digitalisation activities (M.K.)… relates to theexperimentswearemakingwith the infrastructure rightnow,creating more learning spaces outside the auditoriums, there were no such places earlier andnowtherewill beabout10%of thewholearea for informal learningspaces.… It’s an experiment now, and it will be interesting to see how studentswill adopt it and start using it. It also should change thewhole image andmindset of people to study togethermore, alsowhenusingonline learning…’.With this statement,M.H. once again gave proof that thewhole digitalisation process is carried throughwith the purpose to increase sheared (online) learning, make things better and more efficient especially for the students, who represent the paying customers for a private university like EBS. The Role of an Entrepreneurial Mindset… 157