Beyond Developing Skills: Learning to Think

• A new microcredential from the University of Calgary doesn’t focus on deliverables such as business plans and pitch decks. It teaches all undergraduates how to think creatively and respond to changing conditions.
• Assessment exercises require students to reflect on how the content connects to their own majors and encourages them to transfer knowledge to new contexts.
• The 12-hour pilot course was developed by a cross-functional team that included the Office of Signature Learning Experiences, the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking, and the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning.

 
Are short-form credentials in entrepreneurship, innovation, and career readiness really helping students develop the capabilities that employers want? According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, companies are looking for employees who possess resilience, flexibility, and curiosity; who can navigate ambiguous problems, not simply execute predefined tasks; and who are committed to lifelong learning.

Entrepreneurship programs routinely promise to help students develop adaptability, creativity, initiative, and problem-solving skills. Yet, these promises are hard to fulfill if instructors teach entrepreneurship primarily by having students produce specific artifacts such as business plans, lean canvases, and investor pitch decks. While these tools are valuable, they don’t help students learn to deal with scenarios they will face in the workplace: wicked problems, shifting technologies, and situations where the right path is unclear.

Teaching entrepreneurship as a collection of discrete skills is easier because it provides instructors with a clear format that supports teaching and assessment. Teaching entrepreneurial thinking as a transferable capability is harder, because capabilities are revealed in unfamiliar contexts, not scripted ones. It’s not enough for today’s graduates to know how to write business plans. They also must know how to think clearly when the rules of the game are uncertain.

At the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, this challenge came into focus as we developed our Entrepreneurial Thinking microcredential. We intentionally designed it as a university-wide offering for undergraduate students across all 14 faculties of the university. We believe our experience illustrates how business schools can design short-form credentials around capabilities rather than artifacts.

Why Capabilities, and Why Now

The case for capability-focused entrepreneurship education is not new, but the urgency is increasing. In his book Robot-Proof, Joseph Aoun argues that machines can execute tasks but cannot replicate “humanics”—the integrated capacity to think critically, create, and collaborate in complexity.

Entrepreneurial thinking is one version of this broader capability set. Individuals don’t just use entrepreneurial thinking to start companies; they use it to cope with uncertainty, find opportunity in friction, act on incomplete information, and revise assumptions based on what they learn.

The University of Calgary’s Ahead of Tomorrow strategic plan defines entrepreneurial thinking as “taking initiative, exchanging knowledge across disciplines, learning from experience, and resourcefully engaging with creative and cultural literacy.” What is notable is what the definition omits: business plans, pitch decks, and startup formations. The language is dispositional, describing orientations toward action and learning that apply across disciplines and career paths. That definition shaped our new microcredential.

Design and Implementation

Entrepreneurial Thinking is a 12-hour, mostly asynchronous experience offered at no cost to any undergraduate. It is currently a standalone offering rather than a requirement within a degree program, though future curricular integration is a priority. The flexible format lets students complete it alongside regular coursework while receiving feedback on reflective and applied assignments.

It was designed by an intentionally cross-functional team. The Office of Signature Learning Experiences led the design and integration; the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking contributed subject matter expertise; the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning contributed learning design and assessment metrics; and Onlea, a digital learning company, translated the pedagogy into a polished digital experience. Academic oversight came from three academics representing the Hunter Hub, the Office of Signature Learning Experiences, and the Haskayne School of Business.

Individuals don’t just use entrepreneurial thinking to start companies; they use it to cope with uncertainty, find opportunity in friction, act on incomplete information, and revise assumptions.

Collaboration on this scale created challenges. The most persistent was to avoid defaulting to familiar artifacts such as pitch decks, venture plans, and lean canvases. While these are recognizable and assessable deliverables, we knew that if we made them part of the requirements, the credential might appeal only to students who already saw themselves as entrepreneurs.

Instead, the credential’s central purpose was framing entrepreneurial thinking as a university-wide capability, relevant to students in nursing, engineering, social work, the arts, kinesiology, and science as much as business. Many of these students do not see themselves as entrepreneurs, yet they regularly face problems requiring initiative, creativity, and judgment under uncertainty.

To resist the pull toward conventional deliverables and assessments, the team repeatedly returned to the university’s definition of entrepreneurial thinking. We also asked what evidence of initiative, learning from experience, and resourcefulness would look like in any discipline.

Designing for Transfer, Not Just Completion

As a result, we created the microcredential by relying on three design principles. Each is a deliberate departure from conventional credential design.

First, we anchor learning outcomes in dispositions, not deliverables. In practice, this means that instead of requiring students to produce business plans or pitch decks, we ask them to produce written assignments showing how they tested assumptions or changed their thinking across contexts. We want them to demonstrate how they approach novel problems, reframe challenges under uncertainty, and respond when no familiar script is available.

Second, we design assessments to surface how students think. In one assignment, students read faculty mini-cases and write short reflections connecting the cases to their own contexts. They respond to prompts such as, “How does this story change your perspective on what it means to start something within your specific industry or major?” Our goal is to discover if students in nursing, engineering, fine arts, or social work can apply entrepreneurial frames to unscripted domains.

For another assignment, students interview someone in their lives about a problem that person is experiencing, then reflect on what they heard. Students are not handed a problem statement; they must listen, interpret, identify assumptions, and consider whether the issue they first noticed is the one that matters. The range of possible responses—from improving patient intake in a healthcare setting to translating research beyond the lab—is what makes the assignment powerful. It is designed not to produce the same output from every learner, but to help students apply the same capability in different contexts.

Instead of requiring students to produce business plans or pitch decks, we ask them to produce written assignments showing how they tested assumptions or changed their thinking.

Third, we make metacognition part of the structure. Reflection is integrated throughout the course, not added as a summary exercise at the end. Prompts ask students to analyze the assumptions behind their decisions, anticipate how they would approach a similar problem differently elsewhere, and identify how their thinking has shifted.

A prompt that simultaneously works across business, kinesiology, and fine arts cannot rely on disciplinary familiarity as its scaffold, and that constraint pushes the design toward genuine capability rather than disciplinary performance.

What Transfer Actually Looks Like

We piloted the microcredential in the 2026 winter semester. Of the 160 students who enrolled, 112 completed the course. That 70 percent completion rate is notable for a free, self-directed offering with no program requirement. Participants came from ten of the university’s 14 faculties, demonstrating genuine cross-disciplinary uptake.

But we knew that the most compelling evidence for the value of capability-based design would not be aggregate completion data; it would be individual transfer. The credential was always designed to test whether entrepreneurial thinking could be taught in a way that made sense across the university.

The pilot suggests it can: Students from outside business engaged when entrepreneurial thinking was framed not as a singular path to venture creation, but as a transferable way of recognizing problems, taking initiative, and learning through action.

For example, one person who took the course as a standalone elective was a fourth-year psychology student who was working two jobs to support her family while conducting research in psychology and kinesiology. She had no business background and no intention of starting a company. By the end, her thinking had shifted. She left with a specific idea for a venture aimed at improving access to mental health support. She also had a new sense of herself as someone who could start something in her field. What changed was not her technical ability but her disposition and her sense of what she was allowed to attempt.

A capability-based credential is designed to produce that kind of knowledge transfer. By contrast, a skills-based credential might never have prompted such a change in a psychology student with no startup aspirations.

Looking Ahead

When the offering officially launches this fall, our priorities are to increase enrollment, integrate the course more deeply into the curriculum, and gather additional evidence on student learning. Our broader goal is to embed entrepreneurial thinking as a recognized capability across degree programs.

Therefore, we will measure success by more than the number of course completions. We will consider the diversity of participation across faculties, the quality of student reflection, and the extent of transfer into students’ own disciplines. We also will look to see whether students use the credential as a bridge to experiential learning, research, community engagement, or venture development.

We will measure success by the diversity of participation across faculties, the quality of student reflection, and the extent of transfer into students’ own disciplines.

Our natural next step will be to create an ecosystem of stackable short-form credentials that provide more than digital badges. Their value will lie in how they enable students to connect capabilities across academic, professional, and community experiences.

The real question is whether a university-wide credential can hold its integrity as a capability-building experience rather than collapsing into a lowest-common-denominator skills checklist. The pilot suggests it can; whether it does at scale depends on the design choices that follow.

Four Key Questions

Institutions interested in developing or revising their entrepreneurship credentials might ask themselves some of the questions we have addressed on our own journey:

• Do the learning outcomes describe dispositions and ways of thinking, or do they describe tasks and deliverables?
• Are assessments designed to enable students to transfer skills, or do they reward students who have developed fluency with a familiar script?
• Is reflection integrated throughout the credential, or does it appear once at the end as a summary exercise?
• If students completed this credential and entered roles that do not yet exist, would what they learned still apply?

That last question is the practical test: Can the graduate figure out what to do when there is no defined scenario at all? For entrepreneurship education to deliver on what it promises, the answer needs to be yes.

This means that, when developing short-form credentials in entrepreneurial thinking, many schools might need to make different choices. Only when they think about how the content will apply across disciplines will they ensure that the courses will have the broadest possible appeal.