Intrapreneurship and lateral thinking in EFL classrooms Hồ Thị Phương Nam, M A Abstract ‘Creative thinking’ or ‘lateral thinking’ has been considered to render a deft movement among up and coming youn[.]
Intrapreneurship and lateral thinking in EFL classrooms Hồ Thị Phương Nam, M.A Abstract ‘Creative thinking’ or ‘lateral thinking’ has been considered to render a deft movement among up-and-coming young entrepreneurs in the field of business Besides the renowned term of ‘entrepreneurs’, another term of ‘intrapreneurs’ has transformed into another type of power within the business sector The invasion of these two words in the higher education sector, including classrooms for EFL learners where English is not their dominant language, might be a powerful force for change The concept of ‘lateral thinking’, ‘entrepreneurship’, and ‘intrapreneurship’ combination utilized in education areas is likely to be the promising way in order to ‘positively incite’ the creativity of learners; then, they will have got a higher degree of success in education, career, and contribution to the community With this newborn method, EFL classroom instructors are acting as ‘challenge holders’, and ‘opportunity suppliers’ when they are the ones who are willing to deliver some kinds of innovation as ‘intrapreneurs’ with the intention to advance their students right in their classroom Keywords: critical thinking, lateral thinking, learning organizations, innovation in language teaching and learning, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, EFL classrooms Introduction In mid-2019, the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City (UEH) welcomed a brand new unit named ‘UEH Institute of Innovation’ (UII) The advent of this institute equals a pleasant cool breeze coming into an educational organization like UEH – the academic place where ‘arid’ pieces of knowledge are being offered According to UEH Board of managers, this novel organization proves crucial in ‘innovation and entrepreneurship’ at this university – the one, customarily, is considered as ‘a dynamic ecosystem’ for its students to experience ‘entrepreneurship and innovation’ while studying To a large number of ‘students-to-be’, when pondering on choosing a university or college, the one promoting the term ‘innovation and entrepreneurship’ will gain the competitive advantage over others, because this is a trend not only in business, but also in other areas of study or work The commencement of this trend is believed to bring a myriad of benefits for the world of learning and teaching, business, and even the community ‘The early bird catches the worm’, UEH is expected to use this trend as its main enticement for the rising annual student intake ‘Entrepreneurship’ and ‘Intrapreneurship’ in ‘learning organizations’ From a plethora of research, there has been a requirement for the thing labelled ‘learning organizations,’ which means educational institutions need to be re-defined as ‘learning organizations’ ‘Learning organizations’, previously known as ‘schools’, should be kept in the mind of “educators and policymakers” (Stoll & Kools, 2017), in order to embark on and “sustain change as well as innovation” (Stoll & Kools, 2017) together with “tackling the changes” worldwide (Tichnor-Wagner et al., 2016) In addition, this needs to be a kind of care for ‘schools’, because ‘schools’ are definitely demanding “innovations to gain a competitive edge over others” like the way that UEH is pursuing (Hsiao et al., 2009) The phrase ‘learning organizations’ comprises two sections – ‘learning’ and ‘organizations’ in which no sense of relatedness is recorded – the earlier might refer to academic settings, whereas the later connects with business settings Some views denoting that ‘entrepreneurship’ only happens within a business setting, and this expression has been found in most economy topic-based papers; however, to serve the purpose of letting innovations penetrate the academia, the concept of ‘entrepreneurship’ might be put into consideration According to Christine Blanka, in her article written in 2019, she confirms that members of staff at universities need to act as ‘entrepreneurs’, to be more specific, “intrapreneurs” (Blanka, 2019) Along with the belief presented in the article of Zomer & Benneworth, in 2011, the academia’s role and business’ have been swapped; moreover, universities have started to hold a third mission (besides learning and teaching ones – as they are supposed to be) that is establishing “an intrapreneurship culture” (Zomer et al., 2011) ‘Intrapreneurship’ seems to be modern when thinking of the ancient characteristic of academia In fact, from the year 1978, Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot did coin the word ‘intrapreneur’ on paper, these two authors depicted an ‘intrapreneur’ as “someone who is hired by a large business in order to act as an entrepreneur” (Birkemalm et al., 2018) Then, this peculiar lexical unit has undergone some alterations in forms, and these variants have gradually relocated themselves towards ‘education’ situations, some evidence has been picked up with the profuse arrivals of terms like “edupreneur”, the era of “teacherpreneur”, or “teacherpreneurism” (Berry, 2011) Astoundingly, the world of scholars has been impressed by this, after that, intrapreneurship research “is an emerging field” (Blanka, 2019) and “a growing concept” (Birkemalm et al., 2018) The writers of Birkemalm and Jansson, on page of their study, found out that entrepreneurs were more attracted by “monetary rewards than intrapreneurs”, while “challenges motivated intrapreneurs” (Birkemalm et al., 2018) Actions of entrepreneurs are likely to be driven by the matter of money, furthermore, the ones belonging to academic instructors are not primarily stimulated by “making money”, but “finding innovative solutions to challenge their students”, this entails the new form of teaching – an adaptive profession (Berry, 2011) Why does ‘intrapreneurship’ own ‘a certificate of merit’ over its ‘evil twin’ – ‘entrepreneurship’? The response might be the issue of time Immediate profits and the fear of going bankrupt probably limit the activities of a business organization Teachers themselves might “carve out”, in other words, might create significantly enough time to design or come up with profound amazing activities or ideas to serve “the best interests of students”, and to “expand their roles as innovators to respond promptly to the needs of students”, especially “when tenure means one has passed performing metrics”, teachers will have tons of time to explore and spread their expertise (Berry, 2011) To the author of Pinchot (1985), teachers as intrapreneurs are hoped to act only and not “to wait for permission” from their organization, “which can take years”, since they are playing the role of ‘key decision makers’ in their own classroom Teachers are working as adaptive gurus in their field; as a result, ‘the ball is in their court’, they are ‘major players’ who can apply a gigantic number of tools in order to help their students Teachers apprehend where to go and how fast or slowly they are going, that is the reason why they can be “quick decision-makers” who are able to “speed up the process” and “get things done themselves” (Pinchot, 1985) Another strong point that teachers-in-charge are controlling is ‘intrapreneur mindset’ compared to ‘entrepreneur mindset’, which “someone who works within a business” is holding, this hinders the work of ‘entrepreneurs’ in the fierce competing business environment (Bueken, 2014) Next, classroom teachers ‘entrepreneurial skills inside the organization’, or ‘intrapreneurship’ can aid students to experience a culture of trial and error, and this might lead to the fact that they are eager to generate new ideas (Blanka, 2019) To be more creative in yielding new ideas is likely to “enhance employability and career diversity”; therefore, employees-to-be will probably attain a raft of opportunities later in the labor market (Matinde, 2018) Who can resist the temptation to pave the way for such a bright future when registering for universities where they can prepare themselves with this kind of power? Elias Matinde also emphasized that there was the “linkage” ranging from academia to industry, and community (Matinde, 2018) These are the rationales of new ideas’ importance; then innovations should be encouraged Ghardashi and other co-writers, in the article titled ‘Innovation capability in medical sciences universities: A qualitative study of Iran’, argued that innovative products made a salient discrepancy in an individual’s performance and helped to achieve success and higher levels of survival, on top of that, these sorts of unique products were “paramount and beneficial for any organization” regardless of kinds of areas to keep its competitive advantage (Ghardashi et al., 2019), and ‘learning organizations’ need to pay great attention According to the aforementioned evidence of the essential role of teachers, great teachers will also have great occasions to exert positive effects on their beloved learners not only by inventive teaching strategies but by assisting them with displaying their creativity in their own learning strategies (Mahajan et al., 2017 & Kaycheng, 2016) Additionally, “an innovative atmosphere” manufactured by teachers can cultivate learners’ interest in learning (Khikmah, 2019) as well as improve their track record (Baghaei et al., 2013) Shortly, innovations will never cause any harm for teachers and especially for students; they are expected to bring really good points for ‘learning organizations’ customers’ ‘Lateral thinking’ as a tool of ‘innovation’ in EFL classrooms Unfortunately, the use of ‘intrapreneurship’, or ‘innovations’ in the general domain of education and its specific branch of EFL classrooms is still insufficient In fact, the movement has remained “rather slowly” (Maximov et al., 2019) In the same article, Maximov and others also opted for the idea that the innovative development in education was not really ‘innovative’, since classical tools, such as “circles, training sessions, and seminars for students” were being utilised in most classroom platforms (Maximov et al., 2019) In the matter of fact, numerous instructors may find it tiresome, and sometimes, troublesome when adopting these conventional methods in their classroom studies Recently, searching for new ways to instruct students besides testing students’ memory, to many teachers appears to be hard, they definitely need a newly-oriented tool for their students to be able to think in “a pluralistic manner” (Maximov et al., 2019) This shortage of innovative ways urges teachers to seek new ‘thinking tools’, and some researchers want to a similar thing; they have recommended ‘lateral thinking’ as a solution to the mentioned problem In 2007, the author of Edwards explained that ‘thinking’, which was “a means of human’s mental process”, involved the process of ‘looking for meanings of things’ This mental process would consist of the way something was returned into the human’s mind to make sense of an experience (Edwards, 2007) This kind of thinking resembles the previously known logical thinking, or newly known vertical thinking, which means ‘vertical thinking’ develops the ideas in “selective and hierarchical manners” (Waks, 1997) However, one more time, ancient writers did try to explore these kinds of thinking in the early stages of research Back to the year of 1970, Bono stated that the aim of thinking was to assemble pieces of information, then use them to identify which were the best (Bono, 1970) The academics being indigenous to the past figured out another stage of thinking that was to synthesize data, after that, to select the ideal, or the most suitable ones Ancient and modern humans are supposed to have supreme types of thinking, they are not only finding the ideas, but also are able to combine these ones and then decide which ones are the best for their demands of knowledge Besides, in 2005, when researching the thinking skills, Moseley and other authors segmented thinking skills into a variety of interdisciplinary smaller ones, they were skills of “solving problems, making decisions, asking questions, planning, evaluating id, eas, arranging information, and making objects” (Moseley et al., 2005) This is believed to get closer to the term ‘lateral thinking’, which was later clearly and further elucidated by a lot of scholars Like the scholar of Fisher, in 2005, did say that while ‘vertical thinking’ was the equivalent to ‘logical thinking’, ‘lateral thinking’ was the equivalent of ‘creative thinking’ (Fisher, 2005) And Bono, once again, appeared to be quite interested in studying types of thinking; in 1994, he defined that ‘lateral thinking’ entailed “a series of processes about systematic and creative ways of thinking that produced innovative thinking” (Bono, 1994) In other words, ‘lateral thinking’, a dimension of ‘creative thinking’ is, to some extent, ‘illogical thinking’ Additionally, the author of Bono suggested other names for ‘lateral thinking’ like “parallel thinking”, or “sideways thinking” (Bono, 1994) ‘Lateral thinking’ deals with tons of issues, unlike ‘vertical thinking’, it requires a multitude of skills, activities, tasks, etc to come to the resolution of an urgent issue ‘Logical thinking’ provokes students’ creativity in solving problems; subsequently, ‘lateral thinking’ guarantees the success of students now and to the upcoming years ‘Creative thinking’, or ‘lateral thinking’ has been considered to be “one of the 21st-century educational objectives” (Hana, et al., 2017), because this type of thinking is cultivating the creativity of learners; afterwards, they will possess a higher degree of success in education, career, and contribution to the community In addition to language skills training, ‘lateral thinking’ is pivotal in EFL instruction (Seelig, 2012) EFL classroom teachers are directly challenged, and they are holding a huge chance in their hands to some ‘innovative work’ as ‘intrapreneurs’ with the intention to advance their students right in their classroom REFERENCES Baghaei, S., & Riasati, M J (2013) An investigation into the relationship between teachers’ creativity and students’ academic achievement: A case study of Iran EFL context Middle East Journal of scientific research Berry, B (2011) Teacherpreneurs: a more powerful vision for the teaching profession Phi Delta Kappan Birkemalm, P & Jansson, S (2018) Entrepreneurs vs Intrapreneurs: a comparative study about motivation factors of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs Department of Business Administration – International Business Program Degree project – Umea School of Business, Economics and statistics, Umea University, Sweden Blanka, C (2019) An individual-level perspective on intrapreneurship: a review and ways forward Institution for Entrepreneurship and Organizational Development, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria Bono, E De (1970) Lateral thinking: a textbook of creativity Penguin books London, England: Ward Lock education Bono, E De (1994) Parallel thinking: from Socratic thinking to De Bono thinking Melbourne, Victoria, Australia – Penguin books Buekens, W (2014) Fostering Intrapreneurship: the challenge of a new game leadership Procedia Economics and Finance Edwards, S L (2007) Critical thinking: a two-phase framework Nurse education in Practice Fisher, R (2005) Teaching children to think London: Nelson Thrones Ghardashi, F., Yaghoubi, M., Bahadori, M., & Teymourzadeh, E (2019) Innovation capability in medical sciences universities: A qualitative study of Iran Journal of Educationand Health promotion Hana, N & Hacène, H (2017) Creativity in the EFL classroom: Exploring Teachers’ knowledge and Perceptions Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Hsiao, H Ch., Chen, S., Chang, J., Chou, Ch., & Shen, Ch (2009) Factors that influence school organizational innovation in technical institutes and universities World transactions on Engineering and Technology Education Kaycheng, S (2016) Fostering student creativity through teacher behaviors Thinking skills and creativity Khikmah, L (2019) Teachers’ creativity in designing learning activities: sustaining students’ motivation English review: Journal of English education Mahajan, A., & Kaushal, K (2017) Impact of innovative pedagogical teaching methods on students’ academic performance New Nigerian Journal of Clinical Research Matinde, E (2018) Enhancing the entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial attributes of engineering graduates: a review proposal for metallurgy and materials engineering undergraduate curricula at two African universities School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Maximov, D A., Mishin, Y V., Mishin, A Y., Shakhova, M S., Zharov, A N., Lopukhina, R V (2019) Entrepreneurship in educational organizations: Innovations and Technologies International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering (IJITEE) Moseley, D., Baumfield, V., Elliott, J., Higgins, S., Miller, J., Newton, D P., & Gregson, M (2005) Frameworks for thinking: a handbook for teaching and learning Cambridge: Cambridge University Mustofa, R F & Hidayah, Y R (2020) The effect of Problem-based learning on Lateral thinking skills International Journal of Instruction, Indonesia Pinchot, G III (1985) Introducing the intrapreneur; successful innovators in large companies sometimes function as in-house entrepreneurs, running projects as independent innovators would IEEE Spectrum Seelig, T (2012) In Genius: A crash Course on Creativity New York: Harper Collins Stoll, L., & Kools, M (2017) The school as a learning organization: A review revisiting and extending a timely concept Journal of Professional capital and community Tichnor-Wagner, A A., Harrison, C., & Cohen-Vogel, L (2016) Cultures of learning in effective high schools Education Administration Quarterly Waks, S (1997) Lateral thinking and technology education Journal of Science education and technology Zomer, A & Benneworth, P (2011) The rise of the university’s third mission Reform of Higher education in Europe – Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, Netherlands ... thinking? ??, ? ?lateral thinking? ?? was the equivalent of ‘creative thinking? ?? (Fisher, 2005) And Bono, once again, appeared to be quite interested in studying types of thinking; in 1994, he defined... defined that ? ?lateral thinking? ?? entailed “a series of processes about systematic and creative ways of thinking that produced innovative thinking? ?? (Bono, 1994) In other words, ? ?lateral thinking? ??, a... ‘creative thinking? ?? is, to some extent, ‘illogical thinking? ?? Additionally, the author of Bono suggested other names for ? ?lateral thinking? ?? like “parallel thinking? ??, or “sideways thinking? ?? (Bono,