2.1 Key concepts: the learning organization (LO) concept and organizational learning (OL) theory

The ‘learning organization’ (LO) concept and organizational learning (OL) theory have long been central topics in the leadership and management literature. The foundation stone of organizational learning theory, the idea that an organization could learn in ways that were independent of the individual was first articulated in Cyert and March (1963). The learning organization concept, though, is a more recent discipline. It is important to understand the key concepts – organizational learning (OL) and the learning organization (LO) –, used in this paper, by defining each.

These two similar and closely related terms are sometimes used interchangeably, although their meanings differ (Tsang 1997). The distinction between the terms, organizational learning, and the learning organization, was clearly articulated by Tsang (1997) to the extent that organizational learning refers to the study and evaluation of the learning processes within organizations – how organization learns –, largely from an academic point of view (descriptive studies), while the learning organization is seen as an ideal type of organization, which has the capacity to learn effectively and hence to prosper (prescriptive studies). OL is the process of adaptation (learning) and the level of renewability of an organization, while the LO is the result of this learning process. Based on Easterby-Smith and Lyles (2003), research on both organizational learning and the learning organization studies learning processes, but the former does it from a theoretical point of view, while the latter concentrates on the learning practice. Tsang (1997) adds that prescriptive management theories of the learning organization mostly focus on the role of actual behavioral change in organizations, suggesting action-oriented ways of learning that lead to high performance – how an organization should learn. These works, according to Tsang (1997), mostly rely on long years of business consulting experience and ‘best practices’, instead of systematically conducted empirical academic research. On the other hand, research-oriented descriptive studies of organizational learning include cultural and cognitive change, and the learning process is not necessarily linked to higher performance.

This paper rather deals with the practical implications of the LO theory, and many studies on the LO are processed, while the theoretical framework supposes both behavioral and cognitive change when talking about learning. When OL is used in this study, it refers to the patterns of the learning process; when the term LO is used, it refers to an ideal type of organization. The study focuses on effective organizational learning, supposing that higher performance is strongly related to, and expected from learning.

2.2 Practical implications of ‘the learning organization’ in the management literature

The idea of organizational defensive patterns – single-loop learning and the incapability to engage in double-loop learning – as barriers to learning, was first introduced by Argyris (1977, 1994, 2002) in the 1970s and were widely cited. It has become the basis of the prescriptive studies of the LO concept (Tsang 1997), which flourished in the 1990s, with countless publications and workshops related to Senge's work (1990, Kofman – Senge 1993) discussing systems dynamics and leadership issues of learning. Their work has inspired an even more practical discussion, as both researchers and large companies have become interested in tools and activities that accelerates OL. Experiential learning (Kolb 1984) has become a key factor of the LO, emphasized by, for example, Garvin et al. (2008), who stated that each company must become a LO in order to build the basis for long-term future competitiveness. A more recent behavioral approach is interpreting OL as a result of cultural socialization processes (Schein 1994), that is based on deep self-reflection communities of practice (Brown – Duguid 1991). The authors believe that effective OL is even more important these days in a quickly changing international market environment of innovative, knowledge-intensive industries and postmodern organizations such as tech startups and enterprises. The literature discussed above though focuses mainly on well-structured corporate organizations. In the following, two impactful models for the LO concept are described briefly.

Senge's (1990) holistic, systematic approach interprets learning as a continuous, never-ending practice, and OL as the capability of an organization for continuous renewal. The process is more important than the goal itself. Hence, there is no such thing as a LO, but a continuous and dedicated endeavor to become a better version of ourselves and to unleash our creative capabilities, to reach a common vision (Kofman – Senge 1993). To do so, Senge (1990) suggested the five disciplines or component technologies that differentiate the LO from other organizations: 1) personal mastery (ambition, vision), 2) bringing our mental models (thinking logic, beliefs) to surface in cooperation, 3) building a shared vision, 4) team learning (dialogue), and 5) systems thinking (the ‘fifth discipline’, which combines and integrates the other four, meaning that we cannot learn from our experiences in their entirety, due to the prevalence of delayed causal relationships; therefore the world cannot be described by models).

A significant part of the learning literature is focused on experiential learning (Kolb 1984), and emphasizes learning from failure (Cannon – Edmondson 2005; Garvin et al. 2008; Edmondson 2011; Gino – Pisano 2011). However, the fear of failure has already appeared in Argyris' (1977) work, as seen above. According to theory, failure and mistakes are great opportunities to learn from – but one that leaders typically do not take advantage of, often only learning from success. Garvin's (1993, 2008) ‘building blocks’ of a LO are a more KM-based, practical model that suggests that the structures and systems of the LO can be established by leaders' dedicated work in involving members and creating a medium of trust, which contrasts with Senge's (1990) thoughts described above. He states that knowledge is information-based, can and should be observed and measured. Garvin's (1993) five building blocks are 1) systematic problem solving, 2) experimentation, 3) learning from past experiences, 4) learning from others (best practice), and 5) transferring knowledge. The building blocks should be built on the behavioral, values-, skills- and systems-levels.

2.3 Theoretical framework: organizational learning in startups – the ‘start-up learning’

This paper proposes a theoretical framework focusing on start-up learning and adaptive capabilities, that can be built into entrepreneurship education research. To determine these capabilities in education programs, this framework is based on the systematic literature review of empirical studies published between 2010 and 2020 discussing innovative, knowledge-intensive technology startups from the perspective of OL theory. The systematic literature review was conducted between 2019 and 2020. The EBSCO database was used to find academic journal articles with the following search terms and conditions: (SU (startup or start-up or start up or startups or start-ups or entrepreneurship or new venture) AND SU (organizational learning or learning organization); Limiters – Full Text, Academic Journals, Published Date: 2010–2020). After reading all the abstracts, the ones relevant to the topic were chosen from approximately 600 records. Based on the review of the chosen studies, five pillars of ‘start-up learning’ were identified which scholars found as important factors for determining startups' organizational learning patterns: ambidextrous entrepreneurial learning, business model development, failure and experiential learning, benchmarking and learning from others, agile product development. Table 1 presents the five identified pillars, the reviewed studies discussing each pillar, the authors' contribution to the framework (inquired phenomena, used terms, important findings), the authors' subjective understanding and analysis of the organizational levels touched on by the studies and thus, the levels where each study conducted research and presented results (behavior, values, skills and systems levels, as Garvin (1993) suggested). In the following, the detailed results are presented, and the main findings of the literature review are highlighted, to set the theoretical framework for empirical research.

5.1 Insights of Hungarian start-up eco-system in educational context

In order to check and explore the integration of ‘start-up learning’ skills and capabilities in entrepreneurship education programs, one should first understand the start-up eco-system of the studied university. Based on the analysis of the interviews, a few interesting insights have been found about the start-up eco-system, in which the research has been conducted. Interviewees were asked to recall situations and examples spontaneously, where start-up culture can be captured related to the university. ‘Hard’ aspects of start-up management (investment, finance) have become important, supported by university leaders, while educators find it hard to integrate soft aspects of entrepreneurial leadership into their courses. According to one of the experts, “start-up is rather a trendy topic”. However, start-up values and mindset are indisputably present in the education and in the eco-system of the institution. Many startup contests and conferences are organized by the university. Many educators and students are involved in the university's incubation programs and scholarships related to start-up activity, while surrounded by investors, mentors, and great connections. However, this ‘eco-system’ is quite fragmented. Start-up and innovation-related departments and actors are operating island-like, without clear process flows and clear information of each other. Money, experts, and entrepreneurial intention are available, but they do not communicate with each other.

5.2 Adding a practical layer to the theoretical framework

First, the interviewed practical experts' interpretations of the theoretical framework's five pillars were collected. We believe that this practical aspect is adding value to theory, by bringing theoretical principles into life. Table 2 shows that the practical experience is more pragmatic. The terms used are slightly different from academic phrases found in the reviewed studies. Compared to the theoretical framework, in terms of ambidextrous entrepreneurial learning, general entrepreneurial skills were emphasized. As for business models, the ability to change business models and critical thinking towards models were mentioned. Experts' interpretations of failure culture and experiential learning fitted well into the theoretical model. In terms of benchmarking and learning from others, openness to learning was more emphasized in the answers than outer sources of learning, the later having been researched by many studies. Based on the findings, experts and educators have a very different understanding of agility and agile product development frameworks.

5.3 Start-up learning capabilities in higher management education programs

The third output of the empirical research is the findings that answer the research question, based on the analysis of expert interview transcripts and documents of MSc programs. These findings are presented by going through the five pillars of the ‘start-up learning’ framework that was used for coding textual data, while the three MSc programs examined were evaluated and compared. A fourth category was added: findings of the whole university as a context of education. This analytical logic is followed by Table 2, that presents a summary of the most important findings in a matrix, evaluating the five pillars' integration (rows) in the different programs (Leadership and Management – LM, Marketing – MM Management, Entrepreneurial Development – ED) and the university's educational context as a whole (columns). Inside the matrix, the level of integration is indicated: how strongly the different MSc programs support students in acquiring the learning capabilities of successful entrepreneurship, suggested by the framework, evaluated on three levels, strong, moderate or weak support.

5.3.1 Entrepreneurial learning and ambidexterity

As for the university as a whole, experts have experienced, students develop stronger presentation skills than in other universities, self-confidence, language skills; furthermore, students learn business ethics during their studies and engage in extra-curricular and work activities with startup-related knowledge. On the other hand, the lack of process- and systems thinking is a weakness, validation processes, and up-to-date frameworks are not taught, and entrepreneurship-related legal knowledge is missing. Knowledge is rather scattered in the curriculum, and in different course activities, but not linked in students' thinking, which makes developing entrepreneurial learning capabilities difficult.

For the LM and MM programs, which position themselves as education programs preparing exclusively corporate leaders and managers, start-up learning is a value that corporations can gain from start-up culture. Educators have accepted that students should be prepared with an ambidextrous entrepreneurial learning and decision-making style and mindset, regardless of future career. ‘Critical thinking, self-confidence, self-reflective attitude, great problem-solving skills, causal decision-making and teamwork are great strengths of the program on all modules (specializations) of the LM program’ (interviewee). These capabilities are explicitly integrated in educational materials, like projects and case studies, and in learning outcomes specified in the skill-based major development report. The MM program has become strongly market oriented in the last few years. Students can implement pragmatism and attention to the market, and many projects encourage creative thinking (outside the box). The LM and MM programs' weakness, from an entrepreneurial learning perspective, is that negotiation techniques, digital skills, SME examples, and English language courses are not emphasized. Intuitive, situational awareness, encouragement of identity, creativity and intuition, expression of emotions etc. are missing from the programs' mindset, unlike in start-ups’ mindsets.

‘The Entrepreneurship Development Institute has pinned startups to its mast in the last half year’ (interviewee). The ED program is the one that should support entrepreneurial learning, preparing entrepreneurs. Hard skills, like finance and investment are strongly supported by the curriculum, educational materials and tasks. Students are prepared well with business planning, financial planning, analytical skills, and complex, detailed thinking. Innovation management, strategic approach, and design thinking are present in student activities. Educational materials are globally focused and market-oriented, and students study project management from this perspective. However, practical market research skills and validation practice knowledge are not strong, but rather passive. Although digital entrepreneurship development has been trending for some time, the program lacks practical digital innovation skills and tools.

5.3.2 Business model development

Student members of the observed start-up eco-system ‘[…] are good with business models and one-pagers, good in selling themselves but we still experience that outdated models and frameworks appear in the vast majority of diploma theses’ (interviewee). The LM program's process-management module (specialization) explicitly discusses business model frameworks; but more robust and practical models can be found in educational literature. In the MM program and in the curriculum of all LM modules there are project courses (e.g., with innovation HUB), where students can gain practical experience of different business models being interpreted more loosely than theory suggests. LM students gain a strong capability of adapting business models with criticism; and business modelling is a strong learning outcome of the program. The interpretation and meaning of business models, in the MM MSc, is different than an entrepreneurial mindset: ‘for a large company's marketing leader, the business model is a values system, a given context, that one has to function in, one has to bring the marketing mindset to, solve problems with the tools of marketing, but one doesn't formulate it, doesn't change it’ (interviewee). The program's strength is that students can work on sustainability projects and learn about different business models and logic: sustainable equilibrium is a value. In the LM program, well-known modelling frameworks are present in courses, some analytic activities are conducted on business models, but rather from a theoretical perspective than from a practical one. LM students do not have the opportunity to gain experience in building practical, working business models.

5.3.3 Experiential learning and learning from failure

At the observed university and from what MSc program experts have experienced, it is recognized that the whole performance evaluation system and the culture are strongly success oriented, preventing students from experimenting freely. ‘We always talk about successful startups, which is not lifelike – we invite guest lecturers, but there are no examples, stories of failure and downfalls, no one would tell these’ (interviewee). Although students work with educational case studies, ‘there are only a few case studies discussing failures, some emphasizing the role of downfalls behind success stories, but only a few’ (interviewee). The reasons for that probably lay deep in the national-cultural roots of the Hungarian education and entrepreneurial mindset. However, educators express the strong need for a different mindset in experiential learning in education: ‘We never discuss a company's failure. But it would be great. […] Many times, we try to say: do not feel it as a failure, but a downfall that you can learn from!’(interviewee). According to the mentor expert interviewees, student entrepreneurs in the start-up eco-system typically lack time and persistence.

Despite the weaknesses in teaching students to fail, some great examples of encouraging experiential learning in the LM and MM MSc programs have been found. One strong pillar of these programs are project courses. Students work together with corporate leaders, SMEs or social enterprises from different industries on projects where ‘students have to wear the entrepreneur's shoes' (interviewee), while gaining practical experience from a business context. These projects help students to develop other soft skills as well. ‘Self-reflection tasks in project works support reflexivity very well’ (interviewee). The Organizational Development module of LM program, for example, is quite strong in developing a self-reflective attitude with team- and individual reflection tasks and project-closing discussions that, as shown in section 2.2.3, have a positive effect on the effectiveness of learning from failure and on performance. A few courses of the MM MSc encourage out-of-the-comfort-zone situations that form values and attitude strongly, and improve creativity, e. g. non-defined outputs, instead of well framed tasks. In these projects ‘students can experience mini-failures, leading to success in the end’ (interviewee). Experts influenced by the LD program, however, emphasized students' fear of failure and belief that there is no possibility to make mistakes or fail during their education. Based on document analysis, there is no explicit project course in the curriculum of this program where students could try making modest mistakes.

5.3.4 Learning from others and benchmarking

A variety of opportunities are available for students to learn from different experts, mentors and business practitioners, through guest lectures in courses, case studies, scholarships, fintech cooperation, networking events, case-solving contests, extracurricular activities etc. It is found that a benchmarking mindset and analytical tools needed for that are great learning outcomes of all three MSc programs, built into the system in many aspects. It is not only true for the education itself; for example, the LM major development process itself was based on international benchmarking, and research among alumni and recruiting companies.

In preparing students for benchmarking in practice, the LM and MM MSc programs are found to be stronger than the LD program. The LM program also provides analytical tools and mindset. ‘Management is all about benchmarking! Benchmarking is crucial and evident in problem-solving (no need to name it), benchmarking tasks on courses, benchmarking logic etc… It is evident for students seeking for patterns. In management it is a very important practice and mindset in formulating processes’ (interviewee). Interactive forms of education support practical knowledge-sharing (between academia, practicing experts, and students typically with work experience) and learning from each other. The MM program provides even broader opportunities by organizing occasional interdisciplinary, inter-major, inter-institutional projects (with an applied arts university, for example) for students. Learning from outside the organization is also a value. Co-creation and participation topics are strongly and explicitly present in educational curricula and materials of marketing and communication. By discussing these topics, educators would like to show the advantages of an organization's openness to the market, by which, learning from others, is encouraged. ‘It's actually always about benchmarking! We should instead look in ourselves and into our systems sometimes, to see what strengths there are, which ability startups have’, according to one interviewee.

Openness to sectoral, regional, international, and European values, attention to context, market and environmental changes are some of the ED program's strong learning outcomes as well. However, educators find it difficult to build the quickly changing benchmarks into the educational materials: ‘Formalization of benchmarking practices is hard in education. The latest trends cannot be taught in education because they change quicker than education can adapt them (e.g. crypto) – education does not follow the trends’ (interviewee).

5.3.5 Agile approach

Agility is understood differently by experts of different institutes within the institution. ‘[In the LM program], agility as a topic is reaching students from many aspects. We are trying to find out what it means and how it changes organizations’ lives. Critical mindset is very important in all courses, and students take up this approach quite quickly. Organizational theory and behavior courses play a key role in this: questioning the given, knowing that different opinions, opposing solutions can be good from different perspectives' (interviewee). The LM program takes agility strongly into consideration, in course materials and in educational processes as well. Students are exposed to many examples from IT sector agile product development, in the form of case studies that guest lecturers bring in. However, there are fewer agile examples from non-IT companies. A great example of this mindset is that of a customer-demand based, market-oriented major development process that was finished in the last few years with the flexibility to adapt consciously and change models. One of the MM program's strengths is that open and closed problem-solving situations are both present in student activities. Objectivization, immediate and value-based feedbacks and reflection on mistakes, retrospective discussions and 360° feedbacks are also used in class. ‘In our university, agility, agile operation can appear in small groups' project level works, but it is hard to broaden it up to the whole system's level. We believe that we are agile but in marketing this expression is not strongly present. But on the Marketing Institute's level, there is some experimentation with courses that strengthen the agile mindset of students (e.g., identity planning and design communication courses: developing something from zero, all conflicts handled by students, self-reflection needed, building their own operating systems)’ (interviewee). As for the ED MSc program, analytic entrepreneurial behavior and innovation processes appear in the curriculum from time to time, that bring in a new, agile mindset (market analysis, customer-focus, digitalization), but this is still a great challenge for the program. Despite the good examples found, other important aspects of agility, namely, learning from failure and continuous testing is not supported by these three management programs, and BML logic is not given enough emphasis.

5.4 Space for improvement in educational practice

Based on the analysis, our conclusion is that many aspects of the initially presented learning pillars are integrated in the observed management education programs, but on different levels. One can see that these values are strongly proposed by educators, as they appear as skills (learning outcomes) gained through the program, and occasionally they are supported by behavioral activities as well. But educational institutional systems only moderately support students in acquiring capabilities needed for successful entrepreneurship. Based on the findings and experts' suggestions, our recommendations that are presented could enhance learning-based improvement of educational programs of the institution. First, and most importantly, we suggest embracing mistakes, and giving the opportunity to experiment freely, learning from failure in the education programs by providing more entrepreneurial project works where students can experience and discuss mini-failures, and improve their creativity and self-reflection capabilities. Writing case studies and inviting guest lecturers who discuss downfalls would also provide opportunity for improvement. These changes assume a switch in educators' global mindset from ‘teaching about entrepreneurship’, to an action learning mindset of ‘teaching with entrepreneurship’. Second, we recommend encouraging entrepreneurship activity within the curriculum, because we've found that extra-curricular activities don't have that much effect and the attention they get is not enough. A progressive idea that came from the LM program, suggests that a portfolio-based credit-system, or a thesis procedure could be implemented, where entrepreneurial activity counts in the performance of students. This assumes a switch in the performance evaluation system. Third, MSc programs are quite closed, so opening up on a systems level for better learning outcomes would be needed, by strengthening international, inter-disciplinary, inter-major and inter-module cooperation. Fourth, more focus on the ED MSc program development would be expedient, because, unlike corporate-focused management programs, ED has the space and capability for further development that would align to the international standards and quality of start-up and entrepreneurship education. Finally, we suggest strengthening the information flow and connection between members of the entrepreneurial eco-system of the institution, by linking all start-up related organizations, groups and actors around the institution, with a single point of contact or common platform.