Measuring the Quality of Innovative Ideas to Strengthen the Scientific Base for Entrepreneurship Teaching and Research
This paper describes the results of collaborative research between 1000 Pitches student competition and a research team at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan to improve the measurement of entrepreneurial ideas. The collaboration has analyzed a database of 4,537 ideas that tracks the growing entrepreneurial interest among Michigan students, improves the psychometric qualities of a measurement instrument to assess the quality of entrepreneurial ideas and holds promise for developing a teaching tool to improve the quality of ideas. The paper reports: 1) patterns of student participation in the competition, 2) results of factor analyses based on sixteen measured dimensions of the entrepreneurial ideas, 3) results of regression analyses using experts’ judgments to identify dimensions most important in producing winning ideas, and finally, 4) offers a proposal for the development of a teaching tool to improve the quality of entrepreneurial ideas.
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