Acceso usuarios
Rajiv Vaid Basaiawmoit, Kathleen Wagner
Competición o competitividad es sin duda una característica humana innata que a muchos individuos, empresas y organizaciones, de los Juegos Olímpicos a la búsqueda de una cura para el SIDA. Es una de las poderosas fuerzas que nos empuja a sobresalir o extender la mano para más, a pesar de que el criterio de éxito que usamos es relativa a la interpretación de “nuestros competidores”.
Es, por lo tanto, no es sorprendente que en la última década o más, se ha producido un aumento exponencial de los estudiantes de caso competiciones de todo el mundo, especialmente en las áreas de negocio y el espíritu empresarial. Cualquiera de estas situaciones a las tendencias actuales y un mayor interés en el emprendimiento social, estamos empezando a ver un aumento en la tercerización masiva de los problemas sociales en general, a través de casos intratables-competiciones para los estudiantes y no estudiantes. Las competiciones proporcionan un marco para que los participantes combinan sus habilidades, a la red y para contribuir con ideas para los problemas sociales existentes.
Competition or competitiveness is arguably an innate human trait that drives many individuals, businesses and organizations, from the Olympics to searching a cure for AIDS. It is one of the powerful forces that push us to excel or reach out for more, even though the yardstick of success that we use is relative to the performance of “our competitors”. It is, thus, not surprising that over the past decade or more, there has been an exponential increase in student case-competitions around the world, especially in the areas of business and entrepreneurship. Coupling this to the current trends and increased interest in social entrepreneurship, we are starting to see an increase in crowd sourcing to solve generally intractable social problems via case-competitions for both students and non-students alike. The competitions provide a framework for the participants to combine their skills, to network and to contribute with ideas for the existing social problems. Our paper explores the rise of social entrepreneurship based case-competitions through an auto-ethnographic approach of the two authors by combining critical assessment and reflection of their participation in multiple challenges – both social and general. The reflections are buffeted with secondary data-analysis.
We report on the entrepreneurial learning of the authors, and reflect on the process and the engagement levels at different stages of participation. We finally extrapolate our findings in context of other competitions and discuss how these can be applied to entrepreneurship education in general. We thus set a stage for more empirical studies in this emerging area.
