How University of Exeter measures the success of its entrepreneurship programs
In this episode, we chat with Emily Davies, Head of Student Entrepreneurship at the University of Exeter. Emily shares fascinating insights from their latest evaluation of entrepreneurship programs, revealing how student feedback is shaping their approach and uncovering new opportunities for growth. From shifts in student preferences to gender dynamics in business, Emily’s insights offer a glimpse into how Exeter is innovating to support the next generation of entrepreneurs.
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Transcript
Madeline Arkins:
I have the pleasure of speaking with Emily Davies on her work developing an evaluation framework for the incubation and pre-incubation programs at the University of Exeter. Emily actually presented this work in Madrid earlier this year at the UIIN Conference, and I think it’s a really concrete example of how to quantify what is often deemed unquantifiable, intangible, in entrepreneurship education.
So, a little bit about Emily: She is the Head of Student Entrepreneurship at the University of Exeter, where she also leads the student start-up team. There, she collaborates with both academic and professional services colleagues to foster an entrepreneurial culture across all campus, broadening access to entrepreneurial education and nurturing student and graduate start-up businesses.
Before this, Emily worked as Global Employability Consultant at the University of Exeter, and has also previously managed experiential undergraduate education programs for CAPA, the Global Education Network.
Beyond higher education, Emily also worked in marketing for a regional arts center and a music festival, focusing particularly on audience development and community engagement. So, lots of experience to pull from, and very glad that you are here today. Emily, thanks for joining us.
Emily Davies:
Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s lovely to be here, thank you.
Madeline Arkins:
To get us started, Emily, can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to your current role in the student start-up and the entrepreneurship space in Exeter?
Emily Davies:
Yeah, of course. Thank you for the intro and the summary, it’s been quite a winding road to get to where I am. As you mentioned, I started off in the arts and I wanted to work in sort of arts, marketing and events and did that with a theater and a music festival.
Then, I did various things in between that are more into higher education. It was probably about 13 years ago now, first working for an American company that worked with students who were coming over from the States to have an educational experience in London and also to do internships. I found that I really loved working with students and helping them to explore and discover what it is that they enjoy, what they’re good at, and to get professional experience across a whole range of different industries.
From there, I then moved to do a slightly similar role in Exeter. I wanted a change from London and thought Devon might be the place to head for. It was a bit of a gamble, I didn’t know a huge amount of people down here, but I joined the University of Exeter just over eight years ago and initially did a maternity cover contract, which was supporting students who were going overseas to do placements from Exeter.
They were flipping it the other way around. When that contract came to an end, it came about, as many things in my life seemed to have done, through serendipity. I met a start-up in Exeter who were running entrepreneurship education programs through Erasmus. They are bringing students from different countries, as well as from the UK, to do entrepreneurship programs.
The idea was to develop skills and confidence and competencies in students, who were normally 16 to 19 year old, through the lens of trying to get them to think about start-up business ideas. I was drafted in to be an additional facilitator for a two-week program with a group of 40 Irish students, many of whom had never traveled outside of Ireland or done anything like this program before.
I found it really energising seeing how the students responded, the ideas that they came up with, and how they grew in confidence as the two weeks went on. Even those who were a bit skeptical or didn’t fully buy in at the beginning, actually got quite excited when they got the chance to develop their ideas. I loved that experience. It was just over a few months that I was providing additional facilitation support.
And then, an opportunity came up at the university, which was a brand new role at the time as Student Start-up Manager. There had been some great work already happening in Exeter to support entrepreneurship and enterprise, but there was a desire to try and formalise the programs, offer access to more students and build out the entrepreneurship offering at Exeter.
So, I applied, thankfully got the job, and I started that over seven years ago. At the time, it was just me in that team. I had a great boss and mentor called Joe, who led on business support and had worked with student entrepreneurship, but it wasn’t really a formal part of his role. He just got involved because he really enjoyed it and he saw that there was an opportunity to support students. He gave me a lot of creative freedom and breathing space to try things out and build a program. So I tried different types of workshops, structuring the program in different ways, and tried to see what students responded to. I feel really lucky to have been given that opportunity to be creative, especially in the early days.
The program has evolved over the last seven years, I now got a team, so there’s now six of us who are spread across both our external Cornwall campus, and we deliver these cohort-based programs every term, and have two main phases:
- Pre-incubator program: Designed to take students from the idea stage, even if it’s really early stage idea, through to market validation. So, understanding how are they going to actually test and validate their ideas.
- Incubator program: A term-long program which takes them from the market validation all the way through to actually launching their business.
Some of the key things about the programs is that they are cohort-based, which is something we moved to about three years ago and that really helped in terms of securing that engagement from the students and creating a clear pathway for them.
It’s in those sort of two phases, and each of those programs is repeated in autumn and spring, so that there are multiple opportunities for students to get involved.
Also, it probably shouldn’t, but it’s all extracurricular. We work closely with curricular programs but our programs are totally outside the curriculum and involve students from across all faculties, disciplines and years of study. We are open also to any kinds of ideas, so it could be new products, social enterprises, tech-enabled start-ups, … Anything that a student wants to develop and we’ll try and help them to do that.
So yeah, that’s an overview. Whistle stop.
Madeline Arkins:
Yeah, whistle-stop tour. It’s also lovely to hear that, as you said, it was a brand new role, the Head of the Student Start-up Team, and it also sounds like you were really given the creative freedom, which is the essence of an entrepreneurial mindset, having the creativity and time to iterate and ideate and see what works and what doesn’t.
On that, I want to get to this all important evaluation framework. How did that come to be? And tell us a little bit more about what it does, what it measures.
Emily Davies:
The evaluation framework was really something that had been in my mind for a few years. We would do these annual reports where we talk about, how many students we’d engaged, how many had started new ventures, how many grants have been awarded.
We would also track graduate outcomes, how many of those continued to run their start-ups post-graduation, the economic impacts. But I felt that something was missing, and then I noticed talking to other colleagues working in this field that the impact and the value of these programs is so much more complex than that, and there’s so much more depth to it. We talk about how we see changes in their confidence or in their aspirations or in their belief in whether they can do something.
When students join our programs, sometimes they don’t even considered that it’s viable for them to be an entrepreneur but by the end, we notice that there has been a change in confidence, in aspiration, and we didn’t have a way to measure that.
If we were going to the university or to external partners, for example, to try and get funding to grow the programs or to add different elements, I wanted to see if we could find a way to capture that data so that we have evidence of these things that wasn’t just reliant on us being able to get a student in the room to talk about their experience or having a video testimonial to put up. That was the starting point for wanting to try and develop this new evaluation framework.
I then worked with a colleague called Hilary Stevens. She did some incredible work in building the structure and the theory behind the evaluation that we have now implemented. We decided that we would introduce a short pre-survey at the very beginning of each program, with around 10 questions, to understand what is their attitude towards entrepreneurship, how attractive it is to them to start a business, how hard do they think it is to start a business, do they believe that they have the skills and abilities and competencies to be able to actually do it? Another question that we asked is around how much their employment decisions might be influenced by others. Through talking to students, we noticed that some people feel pressure from their parents, who might be saying “This is really nice that you have tried to start a business, but isn’t it time that you think about what you’re really going to do when you graduate?” Or being influenced by peers, so that was another question that we built into the pre-survey.
Then, at the end of each programme, there’s a slightly different evaluation for the pre-incubator and the incubator, and that’s a much longer survey, about 50 questions. That’s quite a substantial piece of work, and I can talk about that later in the challenges.
But I think it was broken down into a number of different sections:
- Their satisfaction with the programme: What did they think about the program content and delivery? Did they find it effective? Did they enjoy it?
- Their learning: How have the programs, if at all, influenced their confidence in their knowledge, skills, their entrepreneurial intent, and their attitude towards entrepreneurship as a viable graduate path?
- Entrepreneurial capabilities: We ask them to reflect on the core sessions. Those questions are really based around each of the topics that we have in our workshops. Have they got a handle on what an MVP is and how they might conduct a market validation experiment? Do they feel confident that they can put a basic cashflow forecast together? And again, we want to understand, how has the teaching been. Do they feel confident in those things or are there still areas where there are gaps in their knowledge where they might need some additional support?
- Personal capabilities: Do they believe that they have the kind of personal and practical skills required to become an entrepreneur? To think creatively to respond to constructive criticism and also to be able to give constructive criticism to others?
- Perceptions of entrepreneurship: Here we ask them of future plans and whether they would consider pursuing an entrepreneurial path. This would help us measure between the pre-survey and post-survey, whether any changes occurred, whether they are more or less likely to pursue an entrepreneurial path after the programs and also whether they perceive it as being harder, easier or about the same.
There is a lot going on in the survey and if anyone would like some more details about it after, I’m really happy to share that. We are trying to understand it on quite a lot of different levels
Madeline Arkins:
It sounds like a really holistic approach. And, as you said, what’s needed when you can’t always get a physical person in the room to be that testimonial. You brought this up already, but everyone always wants to know the juicy challenges of what was involved if they were to also attempt this in their own institution, what must they overcome? What Herculean attempt must they make?
Emily Davies:
I think the biggest challenge probably that people would guess is that it’s not easy to get people to fill in surveys and evaluations.
Madeline Arkins:
No way!
Emily Davies:
No way, it is crazy! Especially if a survey has 50 questions to it. So that has definitely been difficult. I have had conversations with my team, where they are saying “maybe we could make it a bit shorter and then maybe we would get more responses”. But I really don’t want to do that because the whole point is trying to get this richness of data and insights that we weren’t getting before. The thing that has been key for us is that we have built it into the sessions.
Now, before we start the very first workshop, we do some introductions and then we say “before we launch into any of the content, can you just fill in this short survey for us?”. So they do it in the room. It’s also digital, they get a link through Microsoft forms, and then we do the same at the end of the program. We set aside time in one of the final sessions for them to complete the evaluation, which has massively increased the response rate.
So I think that’s been made the biggest difference. I think also giving them context about what we are trying to do, because when a couple of questions came up at the conference around, “if you are in the room with them, and you are asking them to do this survey, isn’t that going to influence or kind of bias the things that they are going to say?”. We put the link up and then we leave them to do it. It’s all anonymised, so we don’t know whose responses are, we don’t look at the kind of responses compared to the individual. But I think giving them context as to why we are doing this. I think, with anything, if you can explain to people and help them understand the rationale behind your doing and that actually a lot of it is about us wanting to continue to improve what we do and understand what are you getting from this? Are there things that are missing? How can we make it better for future students? How can we ensure that that we are delivering real value through the programs so that we can continue doing the work that we do?
I think just taking a bit of time to help them understand the context of it, that we are not just doing this as a tick box exercise, that we really do use this information and we really value the kind of insights that it is giving us.
Madeline Arkins:
Also a vote of confidence, maybe, in how much you value their own experience of the programs. And are there any maybe lightbulb moments that came out of the insights? From the evaluation framework or the results from the surveys that you got.
Emily Davies:
I think some of it has been quite validating of our programs. We have tried to keep that process that you were saying earlier, continually revisiting and trying to improve and say “How can we do this better?” How can we make sure that we are also moving with the times and responding to changing student needs? So I think in a lot of ways there are times when you go “Are we doing the right thing? And is this what students want? And is it making a difference that we think it is?”
So it has been validating sort of hearing or seeing the data where they are telling us they feel more confident and the things that they have learned and how it has shaped their ideas about entrepreneurship and about their own businesses. I think it has been interesting also, we are a way out of COVID times now, but I think that transition back from delivering everything online to doing a lot more stuff in person but some of the content we have still kept online because we had feedback from students saying, although they like some of the online content, they want more opportunities to be in person, to build connections and community with one another. So that is helpful for us understanding what they want, what they need and what they’re seeking.
There was some stats from the end survey around that intention to start a business and their perception of how hard it might be. Because that feels like quite a kind of tricky thing to try and get at the nub of, particularly in the pre-incubator program, which is the kind of early stage at the beginning, about 75% of them on average had the intention to start a business in the next three years, and that increased 84% by the end of the program. In terms of their perception of how hard it might be, that had decreased from 37% to 28% in that program.
It is that kind of validation we are doing the right thing and hopefully we are reducing some of those barriers, whether they are real barriers or perceived barriers, that students might feel towards this as being a viable path that they can take.
Madeline Arkins:
I think that leads very naturally onto a question I just see in the Q&A from Faye. So Faye asked if the data is anonymised, are you missing further data on individuals? For example, whether they have protected characteristics, gender would be interesting to see whether women’s experiences, for example, are different to male counterparts.
Emily Davies:
I should have mentioned, so in the pre-survey, we also we have that data. We introduced an EDI questionnaire at the beginning, and I was saying to Maddie just before we started this call that a main intention over the last year was to introduce that questionnaire so we could baseline where the programs are currently.
We are now working with a team at the university to see how the demographics of our cohort compares to the demographics of the whole student body so that we can see if we are doing enough to make sure that the programs are inclusive and that we are getting a diverse cohort of students coming through.
I think we can look at differences between male and female student experiences. One thing that has come up for me is that there is relative parity in the pre-incubator programmes. It is about 60% male, 40% female students. That changes slightly when we get to the incubator program, so we see a slight drop off of female students and more male students who join the second part of the program. In this past year, that has also certainly translated into the larger amounts of funding that students can pitch for. And that is something I’m really interested in.
This comes from conversation and some focus groups of students where some of those female students have said to us “oh, I don’t know if I’m quite ready yet”, or “I don’t know if I have progressed enough, maybe I shouldn’t pitch for money yet”, and “maybe I don’t need any more money”, and “I’ll just I’ll figure that out later”.
I think some of that is around confidence and trying to build their confidence, to say “actually, no, you should absolutely pitch”, and “it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the funding, but you should put your hat in the ring”, and, “this is a really good business, it’s really viable, you put the work in”. That is a really rambly answer, but I think there are insights that we can draw.
Madeline Arkins:
Absolutely. I think it is even on that like micro-level that you can see the drop-off of female participation into the incubation program and the pitching. We know that from an economic development perspective, we also see those knock on effects, when we know that new businesses will account for most net job creation. So, having even that small number of drop-offs is just magnified. It is great to see that there is focus and interest in that side of things.
We have got loads of great questions coming in. Someone asked, what did you learn that could be improved about your programs?
Emily Davies:
That’s a good question.
Madeline Arkins:
I’m sure there are many.
Emily Davies:
Some of the feedback was around things like how to register a company, producing cashflow forecasts, some of the legal questions that students had about their businesses, whether that is about bringing somebody new into their venture or about their IP. That was something that students didn’t seem too confident about by the end of the programs, so we have made some adjustments to that already in terms of adding some additional sessions for those students that are struggling with.
So I think identifying specific topics that we deliver as workshops within the programs, but that for whatever reason, there are still students who are not feeling totally confident with that. So I think that has, yeah, we’ve definitely then been able to review those sessions and say, how can we improve it? How can we offer additional support for students who might want to need it?
Madeline Arkins:
Okay. I also see some questions about tracking students after graduation. How many students actually set up a business or indeed, how can you confirm whether they do indeed pursue entrepreneurship?
Emily Davies:
Thati s a great question. I think it is a challenge, to be completely honest. In the UK, we have an annual graduate survey that we do. Everybody has challenges with trying to get that data, so one thing that we did was that we created a graduate entrepreneurs network. This was a few years ago that we started, it was before COVID times when there were lots of in-person events, but for us in Devon we know that a lot of our students move to London or back to the Southeast after they graduated, so we started running graduate events in London just two or three times a year, and we would invite a couple of speakers.
We would position it as a chance for those entrepreneurial graduates to make new connections, perhaps with a few years ahead of them and also with one another and to check in with us and try to keep that relationship going. So I think we have done some of that through the graduate events network.
We also have a LinkedIn page that we invite current students too, but also means that we have opportunity to update them or if we want to check in, because when they leave, they don’t have the university email address anymore, then LinkedIn has been a great way to be able to maintain that relationship.
The programs are delivered over the course of a year, and I’d say generally we work with students about 18 months, sometimes two years, and it may be that they try multiple ideas within that time.
If we can build that relationship with them whilst they are in our program, they feel supported and have a good experience, they make the effort to keep in touch with us and tell us when they have got good news, stories or if there has been developments in their businesses.
So, some of it is through the sort of hard, graduate surveys, but then also some of it is through that more informal kind of communication networks that I had through LinkedIn or on a personal basis.
Madeline Arkins:
You have got a variety of touch points across the journey. Before I let you go, Emily, it’s testament to the interest of this topic and the work that you and your colleague Hillary Stevens put in that there are so many interesting questions. One question was about narrative and strategy. How has the data helped you when speaking with internal partners, for example, university executive boards and external partners? Or how do you present this data to funders and stakeholders?
Emily Davies:
The conference in Madrid was the first time I really talked about the evaluation framework. For me it is still a bit of a work in progress. So, having opportunity like this to talk about it and also to see what questions people have that make me go, “huh, I need to go back and think about that harder”, or “I need to continue working on how to tell the story of what we are trying to do” and also the data that we are gaining. As yet I haven’t had to present it to external funders but it is definitely something I’m looking to do because I think, as with everybody in the current landscape, we are definitely going to need to go and find some external funding to support the programs.
But also, if anybody would be interested, I’d love to try and see whether the evaluation would work in other people’s programs. So if anybody’s interested in that answer, I have had a conversation with a few different institutions so far, but I would be really happy to share it and try to see if it would be useful for other people as well.
Madeline Arkins:
Thanks Emily. Maybe just before we pop off, I wanted to get your last thoughts on this because we also spoke last year at the… Yes, it was last year at the Budapest UIIN Conference where you mentioned that entrepreneurship programs at Exeter are very much about a long term investment in the people and developing the skills and talents of those individuals and not just solely the ideas themselves.
Can you elaborate a little bit on how this philosophy maybe influences the way you go about the programs you design and deliver in Exeter?
Emily Davies:
It’s a big question, but I do think it’s really about building relationships and building trust, and about students feeling that, like I said, it is not just a tick-box exercise for us. I’m really lucky I have a great team who are really talented at what they do, but also genuinely are really passionate about the work that we do. I had a conversation with a student the other day who has just graduated this summer and he has got a brilliant business idea. It is really challenging, there are lots of hurdles still ahead of him in terms of developing it. It’s going to require investment, he needs co founders. We have been having phone calls and I have been just trying to ensure that support doesn’t just drop once he has graduated. Instead, saying, “you have graduated, you have your degree, you did amazingly well, how can we still support you? If there are things you want to talk through, if you are looking for contacts, connections, you know where we are”.
I just think it’s that willingness and it comes from a very genuine place of “we have got to know these people and believe in their capability” and whether that’s to do something entrepreneurial or not, that’s not the only thing that we care about. I think it is very much about the people and about saying “It is going to be what is best for you. If you decide that actually this isn’t the one right now, that is absolutely fine too. We will support you with whatever you want to go and do. And if you want to come back in three years time or five years time and chat to us about another idea, then we are happy to do that”.
It is just about people and relationships. It is just the care that goes into it and caring about people trying to find what it is that they are good at, what they care about, and give them the confidence and the skills to be able to do something that means something to them, where they feel a sense of purpose and where they can make a change in whatever way that might be for them or whatever that means to them.
Madeline Arkins:
Leaving that door open for more.
Emily Davies:
Absolutely.
Madeline Arkins:
That is a lovely note to end on, I think. A lovely, hopeful note. And there were more questions, Emily, but this is, I’m afraid, all we have time for. To all who came and joined, thanks so much, and thank you for all the really interesting questions.
Emily, if people want to find out more about the Student Start-up Team or indeed yourself, how can they get in contact with you? Where can they find you?
Emily Davies:
I will drop my email address. Feel free to email me and, if you have questions, I know the time went really fast, so if there is anything else that you want to know, then do drop me a line and let me know. You can also find me on LinkedIn as well, and so feel free to send a message.
So, really happy to talk to anybody that would like to see about the evaluation framework or about the programs or anything.
Madeline Arkins:
Fabulous. Okay. Great. Thank you so much, Emily. And thank you all for joining.
Emily Davies:
Thank you. Bye.
Ready for more?
If you are curious about how the entrepreneurship programs at University of Exeter work, head now to our podcast episode Future-proofing graduates: The role of entrepreneurship education, where Emily Davies explains how their programs empower students to take their ideas from theory to real-world success.
Our article, Flipping the script: From Entrepreneurship Educators to impactful educators, the second in a series on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education, discusses a new framework for integrating entrepreneurial education (EE) into university curricula.
Stay tuned for the next episode on this series and don’t forget to follow us on your preferred podcast platform!
