Page 21 - 21st Century Competencies: Foundation Document for Discussion

Achieving Excellence: A Renewed Vision for Education in Ontario specifies that achievement “also means raising expectations for valuable, higher-order skills like critical thinking, communication, innovation, creativity, collaboration, and entrepreneurship. These are the attributes that employers have already told us they seek out among graduates” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014, p. 3).
Entrepreneurship is sometimes the result of a combination of competencies in the interpersonal, intrapersonal, and cognitive domains (e.g., creativity and innovation, collaboration/teamwork, leadership, perseverance). It is described as:
the process of creating and implementing innovative ideas to address economic opportunities or social problems, whether that is through enterprise creation, improved product development, or a new mode of organization (Volkmann et al., 2009). Research in recent decades has indicated that the quantity of entrepreneurial activity is a critical determinant of the economic vitality of industries, communities, regions and countries (Audretsch, 2007; Florida, 2002; Hart, 2003). (Cited in Sá, Kretz, & Sigurdson, 2014, p. 5)
As Hoffman and Casnocha argue in The Start-Up of You, everyone has to think like an entrepreneur and an innovator.
What’s required now is an entrepreneurial mindset. Whether you work for a ten-person company, a giant multinational corporation, a not-for-profit, a government agency, or any type of organisation in between – if you want to seize the new opportunities and meet the challenges of today’s fractured career landscape, you need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career. . . . The conditions in which entrepreneurs start and grow companies are the conditions we all now live in. . . . You never know what’s going to happen next. Information is limited. Resources are tight. Competition is fierce. The world is changing. . . . This means you need to be adapting all the time. (Hoffman & Casnocha, 2012, p. 8)
Section Two: Defining 21st Century Competencies 19