Abstract
Despite the fact that half of all start-ups fail during the first 5 years of their existence, failure is currently neglected in entrepreneurship education. We posit that what is needed is a competence that allows entrepreneurs to become aware of dangers and weaknesses in the firm – a kind of Sense of Failure (SoF) – and a competence that allows them to use heuristics to react to these dangers, i.e., the competence profile Rescue an Enterprise from Failure (REF). In this paper, we discuss measures for capturing these two constructs and initial validation results. It is the first time that this kind of performance-oriented test instrument has been applied to measure an entrepreneurial competence supposed to prevent entrepreneurial failure. However, we want to point out that our test captures a “simulated” performance that requires participants to describe how they would act based on a written case.
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Notes
- 1.
Parts of this article are taken from our research report to the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI): Volery, T. and Oser, F. (2016). Teilprojekt 2: Entwicklung von validen und reliablen Messinstrumenten für den “Sense of Failure” und “Sense of Success” im Gründungsprozess. Schlussbericht. St. Gallen/Fribourg.
- 2.
CFA for manifest fear: χ 2 (5) = 6.753, p = .240; TLI = .989; RMSEA = .040.
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Oser, F., Mueller, S., Obex, T., Volery, T., Shavelson, R.J. (2018). Rescue an Enterprise from Failure: An Innovative Assessment Tool for Simulated Performance. In: Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, O., Toepper, M., Pant, H., Lautenbach, C., Kuhn, C. (eds) Assessment of Learning Outcomes in Higher Education. Methodology of Educational Measurement and Assessment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74338-7_7
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