Abstract:

The role of entrepreneurship pedagogy in motivating opportunity identification by entrepreneurship students cannot be over emphasized. This owes to the fact that the pedagogical approach adopted in an entrepreneurship programme has implications on whether or not students are able to conceptualize entrepreneurship in real life scenarios. Traditionally, entrepreneurship education was the field of business but in recent times other fields such as engineering also recognize the value of promoting entrepreneurial capabilities among their students. Therefore, the goal of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the entrepreneurship pedagogy adopted in the Nigerian university context and its effectiveness in motivating engineering students to identify business opportunities. Semi structured interviews were used to collect data from entrepreneurship educators teaching engineering students in Covenant University and thematic analysis was used to analyze the data collected. Results showed that most of the entrepreneurship educators perceive the practical sessions as relevant to students’ identification of business opportunities. However, the educators were also of the opinion that the class sessions are monotonous and may impede students’ interest and focus as it relates to discovering market gaps or opportunities. The study recommended that there is a need for a paradigm shift in the pedagogical approaches adopted in Nigerian universities from theoretical to experiential and practical approaches for both class and practical sessions.