Educating for STEM: Developing Entrepreneurial Thinking in STEM (Entre-STEM)

The events across societySociety and businessBusiness influenced by COVID-19 demonstrate that we live in a volatile and uncertain world. Whether events are shaped by the pandemic or other crises, digitalization, political instability, economic downturns, and a globally stretched healthcare system, each requires significant knowledge of science, technologyTechnology, engineeringEngineering and mathematics (STEM) to solve problems. In the face of unprecedented challengesChallenges and opportunitiesOpportunities, there is a dissolution of the traditional silos within the technical and scientific disciplines, and further between scientific knowledge and transferable skills such as creativityCreativity, innovationInnovation and problem solvingProblem solving. Thus, learning for and in STEM will need to go beyond mere transmission of knowledge within STEM disciplines to the possession of transferable skills of creativityCreativity, ingenuity, and the ability to work collaboratively. A realistic understanding of the broader businessBusiness, social and ethical contexts within STEM will be required. Our findings propose an Entre-STEM unifying framework for use by a range of STEM stakeholders ranging from educational institutions, policy makers, educatorsEducators, and funding agencies as it provides a common baseline to work from and enables more consistency in guiding programme design, implementation and evaluation. We suggest that Entre-STEM is a means of achieving this, delivering on the correct mix of technical knowledge in an applied context-relevant manner.