Keywords

1 Introduction

Entrepreneurship is increasingly embedded into both business and non-business education programs (Blenker et al., 2011). Hence, entrepreneurial learning becomes increasingly important in societies dealing explicitly with change, based on individual, organizational, and societal entrepreneurial “capacities” (Gibb, 2002) and value creation (Lackéus, 2018). As part of the growing focus on entrepreneurship, higher educations also offer and develop new extracurricular activities to support entrepreneurial learning among students, which, however, is still an under-research area (Pittaway et al., 2015; Preedy & Jones, 2017; Preedy et al., 2020). The extracurricular side of entrepreneurship expands to a broader view of the entrepreneurial classroom that like experience-based entrepreneurship education (EE) “moves beyond the traditional view on the classroom” (Wraae, 2022). Hence, while the forms “about” and “for” entrepreneurship have dominated the development of EE (Pittaway & Edwards, 2012; Robinson et al., 2016), students’ extracurricular engagement shares a learning potential with the learning typology “through” entrepreneurship (Pittaway & Edwards, 2012). Furthermore, it is argued that through entrepreneurship has the most potential to make students experience what it means to be an entrepreneur because they work with real-life issues through projects or activities (Pittaway & Edwards, 2012; Robinson et al., 2016). Thus, students create “empathy with the life-world of the entrepreneur” by experiencing uncertainty and complexity and learn what it means in practice to develop key relationships (Pittaway & Edwards, 2012). However, while engaging in student-led groups and being part of business competitions or incubators contribute to experience-based learning, these activities are not in themselves leading to deeper learning because the conscious use of reflection is hard for students to undertake (Preedy et al., 2020). Hence, the very nature of the extracurricular experience and the perceived value of it both need more focus and not just the activities per se (Preedy et al., 2020). This chapter takes up a learning experience from a single case (Yin, 2014) of a student-led group of three non-business occupational students engaging in an extracurricular entrepreneurial process. With the advice from a Student Incubator, the students involve in a micro-grant funding at the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship and experience a rejection of the application that is evaluated as not being a “start-up” with business potential. To analyze how this answer affects the students’ learning experience, the chapter asks, What is the nature of the “start-up” narrative in the rejection and how does it affects the students’ entrepreneurial learning experience?

The chapter starts by outlining an analytical lens combining effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2001) and a narrative view of entrepreneurship (Gartner, 2010) in order to grasp the intersubjective nature of the meeting between the students and market logic in the rejection. After presenting the methodology, the chapter analyzes and discusses the logic of the rejection and how the students experience its consequences. It concludes by opening up toward the value of critical reflection and of dialogue in the practice of entrepreneurship. It is not the objective of the chapter to judge whether the rejection is right or wrong. The chapter is about learning from practice in order to improve future entrepreneurial learning when the grand narratives of entrepreneurship (Fletcher, 2007) are embedded in the curriculum as well as extracurricular activities across the domains of business and non-business educations.

2 Analytical Lens

Effectuation represents a niche in its complementarity to the logic of causal strategic courses in business schools and to the business plan paradigm (Mansoori & Lackeus, 2020; Sarasvathy, 2008). Hence, effectuation logic challenges linear causality by providing a theoretical and methodological language that is more about variation than linear processes (Sarasvathy & Venkataraman, 2011), though effectuation and causation coexist as logics that appear in decisions in different phases (Matalamäki, 2017). For instance, effectual logic is regarded to be dominant in the early stages of new venture creation, which is about how entrepreneurs design physical or social artifacts under high uncertainty and unknowable environmental circumstances (Mansoori & Lackeus, 2020; Sarasvathy, 2008) as well as in existing organizations (Berends et al., 2014; Matalamäki, 2017). In effectuation, artifacts are the objects created in the effectual process that can be physical products, new services, and the social structures that emerge as new firms or markets. The origin of this artificial thinking finds its roots in the science of the artificial of Simon (1996), and through Sarasvathy’s initial research on expert entrepreneurs, the two theories have been merged (Sarasvathy, 2008). From the research on entrepreneurial expertise, it shows that expert entrepreneurs basically avoid causal market analysis techniques in favor of various subjective rules of living in the initial phases of new venture opportunities (Dew et al., 2018). Underpinned by Simon (1996), effectuation hereby challenges the view of maximization in decision theory, arguing that humans do not adapt in a perfectly rationally determined way to externally defined goals (Kalinic et al., 2014). Instead, as stressed by the “who am I” in the Bird-in-the-Hand principle in the effectual method, it is different people’s personal means, aspirations, and actions that through interplays with an outer environment shape the relevance and value of new artifacts (Sarasvathy, 2008). Thus, the effectual research shows that expert entrepreneurs don’t forecast relevance and value in any absolute sense through analytical tools prior to own actions but rely on contingencies, events that may occur (the Lemonade principle), affordable risk taking (the Affordable loss principle), and on co-entrepreneurial collaboration (the Crazy Quilt principle) (Sarasvathy, 2008). Both Simon and the effectual paradigm are skeptical about forecasting designs of the future, and effectuation takes up this temporal challenge of finding a way to create artifacts without forecasting through the basic worldview of non-forecasting control (the Pilot-in-the-Plane principle) (Sarasvathy, 2008). This effectual logic finds its stance in a pragmatist-epistemology where knowledge is not an absolute essence in itself (Biesta & Burbules, 2003). Instead, knowledge is connected to what is of practical value and to the ongoing making of meaning through “effectual action” that finds “its distinct philosophical stance in pragmatism” (James, 1907; Sarasvathy, 2008, p. 190).

Hence, the effectual logic is as in pragmatism in that sense open-ended (Biesta & Burbules, 2003; Dewey, 1929; James, 1907). It makes us see, grasp, and learn that variation in entrepreneurship is natural; it changes reality based on what works rather than relying on the essences of absolute truth (Dewey, 1929; James, 1907). Instead, a consequence of the pragmatist position is that the entrepreneurial process comes about as people create meaning living forward (Weick, 1999) rather than planned by absolute theories (Sarasvathy, 2001). The section below connects effectuation to a narrative approach to understand how meaning is created in the relationship between entrepreneurial students and outer circumstances.

2.1 Meaning Through Narratives

Gartner (2010) argues that to practice and study ongoing dynamics of the interrelatedness of an intention/action/circumstance condition in entrepreneurship, we need a language that encompasses entrepreneurial experience and variance over time. Entrepreneurs find themselves in situations and events (circumstances) that challenge and modify their initial intentions, and he therefore suggests a narrative approach to entrepreneurship because, based on Polkinghorne (1988), “narrative knowing” captures the “meaning making” of humans (Gartner, 2010, p. 11). Hence, the form of a narrative compresses the meaning from various situations and events into a “particular type of discourse” (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 36), which makes Gartner (2010) place the text as analytical object. Hereafter, Text is written with a capital letter to mark that it has this analytical status. The narrative Text aspect, then, is a way to deal with experience that is otherwise difficult to grasp - a challenge also known to entrepreneurship education (Hägg & Kurczewska, 2016). Furthermore, the Text as object makes it possible to work with different interpretations of situations and events (Gartner, 2007, 2010; Popp & Holt, 2013). Here, an advantage of the narrative approach is that it deals with time and the temporal relation between actions of the past, present, and future, which is in line with the effectual philosophical transformational stance of pragmatism (Sarasvathy, 2008).

Another advantage of the narrative approach is that the focus on language and meaning enables us to investigate what, with reference to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), will be a metaphorical dimension of narratives and artifacts. Narratives and artifacts are not neutral descriptive elements but have an impact on meaning and experience through the use of metaphors (Dodd, 2002; Smith & Neergaard, 2007). Basically, a metaphor establishes an immediate meaning by cross-referring to two domains like seeing innovation as a journey (Van de Ven, 2017). In the Lakoff-Johnson framework, understanding one thing in terms of another is a structural metaphor; to this they add orientational/spatial metaphors (e.g., up–down, in–out, central–peripheral) and ontological metaphors (e.g., the experienced world as entities, containers, substances, and personifications). Of special interest in this chapter is what Lakoff and Johnson call the cultural coherence of the way metaphors are used to value experience in various subcultures, for instance, when a certain meaning is valued and prioritized as UP, IN, or OUT (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Such uses also carry potential conflicts because, as Dewey argues from the pragmatist perspective, humans might take what is of chief value to them as the real (Dewey, 1929). To Dewey, a prioritization of value happens as a result of “selective emphasis” (Dewey, 1929). One problem for Dewey is that selective emphasis not only promotes a particular dominant way of thinking about purpose; the purpose in itself also produces an acceptance of the parts that are left out of the purpose, precisely because they are omitted with a purpose. The general insight from this is that a discourse can thus promote a naturalization of a certain reality as more real than another, or, as Dewey explains: “It is natural to men to take that which is of chief value to them at the time as the real. Reality and superior value are equated” (Dewey, 1929, p. 52).

Entrepreneurship in this narrative and metaphorical light is not about static meanings but about how social reality gains meaning (Garud et al., 2014; Smith & Neergaard, 2007). Thus, following Venkataraman et al. (2013), narratives about entrepreneurial agency can be either distributed or located within individuals and affect the belief people have about entrepreneurial action. Furthermore, artifacts can both be infused with narrative meaning and also be capable of driving social and economic change (Venkataraman et al., 2013). Finally, narratives themselves as artifacts can be strong influencers of social reality (Venkataraman et al., 2013), which is also about how institutional facts are created as social reality by the use of language and speech acts (Searle, 1995). However, in the very practice of entrepreneurship, meaning is performed in concrete situations, where the “Ask” is used as an effectual concept to define what characterizes a significant activity in the early stages of entrepreneurial processes (Dew et al., 2018). The Ask is framed as an important building block in developing entrepreneurial expertise as deliberate purposeful engagement in situations of high uncertainty and deep dependence on human intersubjectivity (Dew et al., 2018). Here, the “tentative ask” and the “co-creative or effectual ask” respond to complex situations that require an open-ended form of inquiry low on prediction, where stakeholders are invited to shape and commit themselves to the entrepreneur’s ideas. Such situations are compared to the causal Ask that counts the “pitch” and the “transactional ask” like negotiations where the prediction of desired outcomes constitutes the performed situations (Dew et al., 2018). It is important to note that the Ask involves the Askee (Dew et al., 2018), and as the analysis shows, the answer as narrative is important to investigate further to understand how to train entrepreneurial expertise in the interplay between the social reality of entrepreneurship and student entrepreneurs (Venkataraman et al., 2013). This is in line with the narrative reader-response-theory approach advocated by Fletcher (2007), which focuses on the “stretchiness” of entrepreneurship narratives. Following Fletcher, the “stretch” enables us analytically and in educational situations to go beyond the text to how different people connect to a text and to investigate why and with what effects the grand “narrative world of entrepreneurship” filters into the micro-stories of people across contexts (Fletcher, 2007, p. 651).

In accordance with the latter, narratives are closely linked to a discursive approach, and according to Hjort and Steyaert (2004), there is no clear division between the two. Instead, they argue that the language dimension in entrepreneurship makes it apparent that entrepreneurship is a creative force in society that affects and changes daily practices and lives. This is about how the future orientation in entrepreneurship is invented “in populating histories of the present, here and now” (Hjorth & Steyaert, 2004, p. 3). Thus, the events of the here and now of everyday entrepreneurial processes are organized in stories and conversations as a primary form of knowledge in social situations constituted by the discursive nature of knowledge, self-narratives, subject positions, desires, attention, resources, and images (Hjorth & Steyaert, 2004). These stories are, however, also the object of critical entrepreneurship research showing that the entrepreneurship discourse and established narratives generate not only bright effects but also dark sides, e.g., through heroizing narratives that can be difficult to live up to (Berglund & Johansson, 2012). Summarizing, building on effectuation, the analytical lens makes it possible to understand how and why logics shape the initial stages of entrepreneurial processes of students. Furthermore, connected with the narrative dimension, the analytical lens sheds light on and capture the meaning making when students engage in early stage entrepreneurship including experienced consequences of the way interactions actually unfold as part of outer circumstances. To investigate these aspects, the next section presents the empirical data, which is followed by the analysis of how a start-up-logic shapes the understanding of entrepreneurship for students and which experienced consequences this shaping of reality has.

3 Methodology

The data emanate from a larger case study that, from a perspective of pragmatism as philosophy of science, studied how, why, and with what consequences undergraduate students make meaning through entrepreneurial projects (Nybye, 2020). The study took place within the student context of a Danish University College providing Professional BA programs in various welfare professions. In order to investigate the entrepreneurial processes as they were experienced by the students in situ, the research project was conducted as a rich, detailed qualitative ethnographic field study (Eberle & Maeder, 2016; Lofland et al., 2006). The data were gathered through observation, video/audio-recordings, interviews, and written and visual materials from ten cases of students creating new ideas, which overall purposes were to help and assist other people with better options in various areas of society connected to the specific education of the students. The data collection had the following courses as a starting point: Learning Material Design and Entrepreneurship (Teacher Education); Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Social Education); and Innovation Across Health Professions. However, one case of three students (Occupational Therapy (OCT)) was an outlier in the data material as they expanded a course on Health and Work Environment into an extracurricular early-stage entrepreneurial process (Nybye, 2020).

In this chapter, I take the OCT team case as a single case that is revelatory of longitudinal process data prior to and after critical events (Yin, 2014). As part of a curricular course, which combine theory and practice-based learning, the students develop a product idea in the area of work environment through external collaboration situated within a microbiology laboratory at a Danish university hospital. At the laboratory, the bioanalysts have for a long period been experiencing arm and shoulder pain from poor working postures when they reach out for laboratory and analysis equipment at the lab’s work stations. The OCT students, who are in their final semester, succeed both in teaching the laboratory technicians about anatomy, workloads, and working postures and in developing an idea for a physical product that can remedy the arm and shoulder problems. The students apply mathematical calculations from the Danish Working Environment Authority to develop the product idea, which is designed as a transparent table mat with a windscreen-wiper area divided into three visual fields that are to mark the optimal and less optimal places to place equipment (Appropriate Reach Mat). As part of the extracurricular process, the students are guided by student incubator consultants to make a prototype in collaboration with employees in a “Fab-Lab” at the local business academy.

The situation then is that after the exam in the Health and Work Environment course, the students decide that their idea is worth pursuing and investing their spare time in. The team leader at the hospital has heard that the students will continue their process and sends an e-mail to let the students know that they need and require the product and would otherwise consider developing it themselves. On the advice of the student incubator, the students apply for funding to secure IPR Design Protection through a micro-grant program hosted by the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship. The application consists of an application form in which the students must account for a business model and a video-recorded pitch. The analysis in the overall research project reveals that the business language inherent in these formats is experienced by the health students as foreign to them and thus as something they have to interpret, make sense of, and acquire in order to fulfill the micro-grant application.

As part of the micro-grant procedure, an evaluation committee consisting of a third-party evaluator from a national Inventor Advisory Service rejects the application, arguing that the product is not a start-up with business potential. In the analysis, I take the rejection Text, in the Gartner-Polkinghorne sense, as an object that draws together meaning from a specific situation and event into a particular type of discourse. The following analysis, therefore, presents an excerpt from the rejection e-mail because, as the analysis shows, it compresses a larger meaning, using the start-up as an essential narrative shaping the answer to the students. Hence, the “start-up” appears as a grand narrative that functions as an initial analytical entrance to the wider meaning of the Text.

4 Analysis

The e-mail rejection Text in focus of the analysis has sender complexity built into it as two senders communicate to the students, with the host of the micro-grant program as the primary sender and the Inventor Advisory Service as the secondary sender. The voice of the secondary sender addresses the students in the following excerpt:

It is good to see that you cultivate your professionalism, and that gives credibility. But we believe that this is a product rather than a start-up. We do not see business potential in this idea. XX [name redacted] of the Danish Technological Institute [e-mail address redacted], who sits on the evaluation committee, is happy to make himself available in relation to how you can get further advice about design protection and how it may be an idea to sell the product to a company that already sells occupational products,Footnote 1 as they are established in the market. Do use this option.

The entire Text in the e-mail is rounded off by the primary sender encouraging undergraduate students in general to enter their “start-ups” in the national “Start-Up Program” competition for students hosted by the senders themselves.

This event of rejection is critical in the students’ entrepreneurial process and therefore important to analyze further and understand in more depth post the event because it reveals a paradox in the case and a finding that the rejection addressed to the students creates a hidden severe dichotomous dramaturgy in the entrepreneurial process. On the one hand, the effectual language conveys how the students make relevant meaning in their emerging entrepreneurial process on the side of the students’ field of interest (Bird-in-the-Hand), partnering with a hospital (Crazy Quilt), and it is worth pursuing as an optional, extracurricular process (Affordable loss) (Sarasvathy, 2008). The students are evaluated positively by the head of the department at the Department of Microbiology as help to realize a desired future of “the perfect workplace” (Interview, 03: 54). In the interview, the students are positively described as “self-leading,” able to help with “fresh eyes,” where the department itself is “home-blind” (inured and oblivious to problems) and “cannot always see the opportunities themselves” (Interview, 15: 55). Hence, the students’ creative process interplays with the managers’ view of reality, and they make an immediate difference in that context. On the other hand, the rejection e-mail presents another reality. As illustrated above in the start-up-Text, the secondary sender presents several evaluative judgments to the students, describes an opportunity for advice, and gives encouragement to use the advice. Subsequently, as analyzed below, the students experience critical consequences of the e-mail, which affirms the hidden dramaturgy.

4.1 A Hidden Dramaturgy and Its Consequences for Meaning Making

In the interview with the students, one of the students presented the experience as “a slap in the face, because we had spent so much time on it, even though we could understand the reason for the refusal.” The interview enquires further into how it may be that they understand the reason for the refusal. One of the students expresses their rationale and explains that it makes good sense, as the micro-grant program would only finance the start-up of companies, and they have a product (Interview, 17: 47).Footnote 2 While this rationale appears to be a clear recognition of the situation, it is more difficult for the students to grasp the dynamic forces affecting their process. As such, the students interpret the reason for the situation turning out as it did in different ways (coded A, B, C). Student A reflects in the interview that there may have been incorrect guidance from the incubator’s innovation consultants at the educational institution. Student B does not think that they have received incorrect guidance and believes that they were told they could read about the criteria themselves. Student C reflects that they might have seen it themselves, but they understood it differently, and concludes that the application has been a good learning situation. Almost 50 min into the interview, following a conversation about design protection, the interview returns to the “slap in the face” metaphor to investigate the meaning more closely. Student B elaborates: “It was not a slap, but something that slowed down the process and it was difficult picking up the process again.” She reflects on it and continues: “Maybe it was more a punch in the stomach.” Student A explains that it is an expression of something that is a “setback” (Interview, 47: 18).

The students apply a structural metaphorical language to grasp the experience and make the rejection e-mail meaningful. Hence, the experience is narrated as a “slap in the face” and as a “punch in the stomach.” The slap is connected to time (slowed down), a construct that Lakoff and Johnson (1980) explain is a central cultural issue, and to Lakoff and Johnson time is associated with other sub-categories in our daily lives. For instance, time is something you can invest (money), have enough of/run out of (limited resource), and can give (commodity); thus, time is a variant relative to situations in life where it is something we are able to control or, vice versa, something that we do not possess enough of, are not able to invest or give. The analysis shows that the rejection e-mail triggers an imbalance of time and control, and this alters what is actually experienced as meaningful by the students to a loss of meaning.

The process is also explained as something that is “difficult to pick up again.” It is an expression rooted in daily physical and embodied experience with the world; hence, the rejection is experienced and understood through orientational/spatial metaphor. More generally, the orientational metaphors are about valuations of what is up, more, less, or better, and this connects to our experiences of, e.g., “feeling up” (happy) or “feeling expansive” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 18). Following Lakoff and Johnson, this up-down valuation is crucial in Western thought, where other cultures may pay more attention to balance or centrality (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). As such, “up” tends to be valued better than “down,” where up is associated with spatial values such as better, more, and bigger, while down can be associated with feelings of depression or a term like lesser. Such valuations are important in the data because the start-up narrative in itself expresses this up-going reality. In addition, the start-up attention promoted by the subject position of a judge (Hjorth & Steyaert, 2004) is amplified by the overall status the start-up is given. Furthermore, this status is emphasized by the spatial perception of “business potential,” a logic that can be connected to other upward-oriented metaphors such as growth or the hockey-stick curve and a propagating, expanding orientation. Here, the analysis shows a dark side of the start-up narrative, the difficulty of “picking up again,” the “slowing down,” and “setback” of an already forward-moving process that the students experience as meaningful. However, a more subtle market logic seems also to play a role in the rejection, as discussed in the following section.

5 Discussion

In the refusal to the students, not only is a start-up valued over an emerging product; the expressions “But we believe …” and “We do not see business potential in this idea” promote a more invisible causal market view. Effectuation as an analytical lens challenges the objective naturalness and the normative approach with which this causal market logic is communicated to the students: what if the students are actually creating a market commitment through their involvement in the hospital lab established as part of their Health and Environment course? What could happen if the students created a closer partnership with the hospital? However, in the rejection, it is forecast that there is no business potential in the idea, and it is suggested that it is better that the students turn to well-known players in a well-known market. Hence, in the rejection Text, the discursive nature of knowledge (Hjorth & Steyaert, 2004) associated with the start-up narrative is primarily that of forecasting, and this world view is communicated to the students as a particular way of thinking.

In practice, the rejection remains unquestioned. As shown in the analysis, when one of the students reproduces the rationale in the refusal, not only, therefore, is this an acceptance of the refusal per se, but we can also see that the experience is internalized (habituation) around a dominant entrepreneurship discourse of prediction, start-up, and business potential. A problem from a pragmatist perspective is that pragmatism discusses the separation of primary experience from the language and concepts that humans use to symbolize nature and human experience (Dewey, 1929). In that regard, the primary entrepreneurial experience of the students is rooted in academic curiosity, and they explain that curiosity about whether the product works drives them more than the interest in making money out of it (Interview, 19: 20). A more practical value is important to the students rather than a predefined market theory and this drives the transformation of their ideas and aspirations into an artifact that might be useful in human as well in economic terms if it improves the work environment conditions or re-develop into new solutions in a co-creative process. Instead, the narratives of “start-up” and a predefined idea about “business potential” emphasize a social reality connected to grants (money). This is self-fulfilling because as Dewey discusses what is of chief value to humans risks being taken as the real: “Reality and superior value are equated”, as he argues (Dewey, 1929), which drives the separation mechanism and the exclusion of other values. To Dewey, this is not necessarily a problem, because as humans we can in principle turn to other aspects that present value to us. In this case, for instance, the students turn toward the completion of their education. However, one fact remains unaffected from the meeting between the health professionalism of the students and market thinking, namely that no actor questions the notions of truth and the “ultimate Being” (Dewey, 1929) of the start-up value and logic of forecasting in the rejection Text. Thus, the institutional forces remain untouched and reflection on experience in a learning perspective is absent. This leads to the following implications.

5.1 Implications for Entrepreneurial Learning Beyond the Four Walls of the Classroom

In the effectual process, experience is accumulated as the action unfolds based on the entrepreneur’s means at hand, seeking acceptable risk levels and in partnerships where people commit because they want to work together (Dew et al., 2018). Hence, entrepreneurship becomes intersubjective and “expertise acquisition” thus becomes a matter of “situated and social cognition” as well as of “individual cognition” (Dew et al., 2018, p. 401). This challenges entrepreneurial learning for students that might be inexperienced entrepreneurial practitioners because as the findings in the analysis confirm the mutuality of situations in entrepreneurial practice “have strong influence on activity performance” (Dew et al., 2018, p. 402). For instance, as the analysis shows, what figures as a meaningful initiative for the students is through the intersubjective engagement with institutional stakeholders (authority) turned into a loss of meaning. To prevent a loss of meaning from becoming an end-station, a challenge here is to turn experience into reflective meaning making as the basis for forward-moving action (Dewey, 1916, 1929) and relevant extracurricular entrepreneurial learning (Preedy et al., 2020). A future path will be how to reflect with students on the influences of values in the dynamic interplay between different actors and turn such feedback into experiences in “continuous learning” (Mansoori & Lackeus, 2020).

Effectuation suggests that market logic other than the dominant one of forecasting is possible. Hence, the analysis can be used to open up toward more open-ended guidance and answers from official enterprise advice systems and policy-driven organizations. A possible way is to refocus dominant start-up discourse toward the social or societal effects various students create as success factors (Berglund & Verduijn, 2018), building on situations of, for instance, “tentative ask” or “co-creative ask” to shape shared conceptions and mutual learning among students and partners (Dew et al., 2018). This ideal is inherent in the pragmatist background of Dewey that believed in communication as the tool to obtain common understandings (Dewey, 1929). However, as analyzed in this chapter, such a communicative ideal cannot be taken for granted. A future question to entrepreneurial learning is how to balance asymmetric stakeholder forces when students are practicing entrepreneurship. To practice the ask together with critical reflection is therefore recommended to explore further.