| Abstract |
Tiimiakatemia is a successful entrepreneurship education programme developed in Jyvaskyla, Finland, over the last 23 years. Under the name "Team Academy" the philosophy and methods have spread across Finland and to 12 other countries including the UK. Tiimiakatemia remains close to the centre of Team Academy but the two are now discrete. In this paper we reflect on the experiences of coaches and educators in the UK in adapting and implementing a Team Academystyle programme. We ran focus groups, and interviewed coaches from Newcastle Business School and also from other UK universities involved in adopting the same Finnish learning model. The interviews were either informal or semi- structured to allow a variety of experiences to surface and to capture evidence of value and challenge from unpredicted quarters. Observations were also drawn from informal discussions with student entrepreneurs. A number of key themes emerged during the project. UK participants tend to be younger than their Finnish counterparts with consequential differences in levels of experience, independence and maturity. Newly founded Team Academies have a steep learning curve in the development of a sustainable culture, and a shared vocabulary is an important factor with positive and negative implications. The international Team Academy network is a major source of support in the sharing of best practice and generation of new ideas. There will always be a tension in the UK between the drive to create and apply innovative teaching methods and the formal obligation to collect formal evidence to justify academic awards to programme participants. We also reflect on the importance of fees, travel and the philosophy of assessment. |