Importance of entrepreneurial mindset

Why entrepreneurial mindset is important for all students, independently on their carrier path, either they want to become an entrepreneur or to work as an employee in a company.    

AgroParisTech is sharing their approach to Ecotrophelia

Entrepreneurship is a key competence for students in food engineering curricula, whether they which to create their own enterprise after their diploma, or develop new projects after joining an enterprise. 

Project such as EcoTrophelia, during which student's teams develop innovative food products, are key components of curricula to help them to discover and develop entrepreneurship. However, to be efficient, experience-based learning such as the participation in this competition must be accompanied to help student formalizing the competencies they are developing, so that they can evaluate themselves, their progress, define and reach their own objectives, that are specific to each individual.

To do so, AgroParisTech is implementing a new approach this year. 

A questionnaire has been developed, so that students are guided to evaluate some of their entrepreneurship competencies. Throughout the project, students will fill the same self-evaluation form 3 times: 

• at the beginning of the project, when the team is built or just start working together; 
• after finishing the main part (finalization of the project through the redaction of a complete report); and 
• after completing the project through their participation in the national competition, organized in 2022 in the French city of Nancy, in front of a jury composed of professionals. 

The objective of this new approach is to help each student to identify their self-awareness. Understanding their strengths is an important part of being self-aware and taking control of their career. Knowing their strengths and how to grow them can help them find a line of work that they will enjoy while also enabling them to improve their skills in the areas most relevant to their career path. People who understand their strengths have a better grasp of what makes them unique and how their personality impacts their team. 

Important part of self-awareness is also to learn one’s weaknesses to identify the room for progress in order that they are not being in a way for someone’s success. 

During the self-evaluation students also learn how to objectively evaluate their competencies so that they can progress through the project. 

The evaluation grid as been proposed by Catherine Lecomte, an AgroParisTech staff member that is an expert in entrepreneurship, and a participant in the EntreCompFood Project.

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