Ohio Northern University associate professor of business Jill Christopher, along with fellow colleagues Dexter Woods, professor of business administration, and Robert Kleine, associate dean and professor of marketing, co-authored an article that will appear in the spring 2014 edition of Accounting Instructors’ Report.
Titled “From Idea Pitch to Business Brief: Entrepreneurial Mindsetting in a Managerial Accounting Course,” the article was based on a previous exercise that Woods has used in his business law course. Christopher, who served as the lead author, adapted its basic methodology to apply to a managerial accounting course, and she wrote a case study paper about pet-sitting to go along with the article, so that the reader can envision what a good submission by a student might look like.
Christopher said, “The journal that the article will be published in is widely read by accounting instructors and provides practical teaching tools that can be readily implemented in the classroom. The projects that I developed are examples of high-impact learning, a concept that is embraced and encouraged by the Dicke College of Business Administration.”
This paper presents two integrated course assignments – one for individuals and one for small groups – that encourage students to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset within the context of a managerial accounting principles course. The assignments consist of individual students preparing competition-quality idea pitches, several of which are then selected for development by student groups into business briefs addressing issues that are problematic to microentrepreneurs.
These active and experiential learning assignments provide an efficient, engaging and fun way to help achieve entrepreneurial mindsetting and a variety of other learning objectives from university, college, learning theory, accrediting agency and professional organization sources, including those recently set forth by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) in its Standards of Accreditation (2013) and by the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) in their Pathways Commission Report (2012).
This paper explains what it means by an entrepreneurial mindset and how helping students cultivate such mindsets furthers various other learning objectives. The paper then describes the idea pitch and business brief assignments and how the assignments help satisfy entrepreneurial mindsetting and the other learning objectives. The paper also contains an appended sample business brief to provide additional guidance for instructors and students.
