Measuring Entrepreneurial outcomes form a residential Enterprise School for Postgraduate Researchers

This paper describes the measurement of entrepreneurial outcomes from a four day
residential Enterprise School for Ph.D. and postdoctoral researchers from a mix of
subject areas held in North West England. We determine the effectiveness of the
programme in terms of encouraging a range of entrepreneurial behaviours from
increased confidence to start a business to the actual creation of a business, and
also intermediate outcomes such as using their new skills when returning to the
workplace. Using a questionnaire at the end of the course and then eight months
later, we have tried to fit the outcomes to the Rugby Team Framework as a model
to measure the impact of the school in terms of what elements of the course they
had incorporated in their workplace. We found that most students after returning
still said they were more likely to start a business, a small number had actually
started a business but interestingly we found that many were using the skills they learned now in the workplace, for example, opportunity spotting. These
intermediate outcomes are often neglected by other studies but could prove
valuable for employers and from those employees with them leading to higher
employability and faster promotions.