Empowering Innovators: Health Entrepreneurship as a Catalyst for Learning Excellence

This chapter explores the role of entrepreneurship in higher education, particularly through discipline-specific courses like health entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a key competency for innovation as it fosters qualities such as grit, innovative thinking, systems thinking, problem-solving and a growth mindset, which can also aid in student success. Higher education, which serves students, employers, and society, is tasked with cultivating entrepreneurship as a graduate attribute. This cultivation produces entrepreneurs capable of innovating to address economic challenges. This chapter argues for a country-, discipline-, or sector-specific definition of entrepreneurship, which should guide the development of specialised entrepreneurship courses. It argues that these discipline-specific courses are critical as the goal is to help students develop the competence, confidence and agency to navigate the sector. Furthermore, applying a deep and meaningful learning approach to entrepreneurship course development will further enhance students' competence and confidence. Furthermore, entrepreneurship courses cannot stand alone, and the institutions' role in fostering an entrepreneurship culture as part of their learning excellence philosophy is also discussed. The chapter uses the development of health entrepreneurship, a field of study for the Bachelor of Health Science Honours in Health Systems Science course at the University of the Witwatersrand, as a case study. It investigates the use of deep and meaningful learning design in creating the practical health entrepreneurship curriculum, the role of culture in situating entrepreneurship courses, and the need for institutional cultural innovation. It concludes by offering practical approaches for embedding entrepreneurship as part of learning excellence.