About Us

Our Mission

The Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education (CIEE) is committed to the development of entrepreneurship at Dawson College by offering students structured and tangible opportunities to develop their entrepreneurial skills.

The CIEE’s focus is on promoting entrepreneurship as an educational value by supporting extracurricular, curricular and pedagogical activities in a context of sustainable development, social, economic and environmental responsibility and good citizenship.

Our Values

Innovation:      find creative and innovative ways to offer entrepreneurship support and training

Collaboration:  work with various organizations in the community to enhance service delivery

Responsibility: consider the economic, social and environmental impact of our activities

Our Goals

1. To develop entrepreneurial values as a means to academic success
2. To stimulate innovative and entrepreneurial mindsets
3. To introduce entrepreneurship as a key competency for lifelong learning
4. To bring students to consider the creation or takeover of an enterprise as a viable career option
5. To support student-initiated entrepreneurial projects
6. To act as a catalyst for economic development

Our Means

The CIEE offers four means to achieve these goals:

• Extracurricular: by developing extracurricular entrepreneurship training, promotion and awareness activities
• Curricular: by developing academic activities related to entrepreneurship
• Pedagogical: by helping teachers integrate entrepreneurship into existing curricula
• Community: by developing strategic partnerships with the business community and leveraging existing entrepreneurship training and support expertise

Entrepreneurship Education

Entrepreneurship as a key competency for lifelong learning

The aim of entrepreneurship education is to create a wide pool of entrepreneurial individuals better equipped to respond to the increasing need for adaptability in the labour market.

Through various curricular and extracurricular activities we hope to inspire youth to undertake new projects, launch commercial businesses and create ventures with social impact. More generally, students will potentially be better positioned to make a positive contribution to society through more active citizenship.

The goals of entrepreneurship education are

1. to demystify entrepreneurship in order to foster more positive attitudes towards it
2. to develop ‘entrepreneurial’ competencies

Most people associate entrepreneurship with business studies when, in fact, entrepreneurs emerge from many sectors of activity. We all know of engineers, programmers, nurses, designers, community workers, farmers and circus performers who have taken the leap from student or employee to entrepreneur.

Although the CIEE aims to inspire students to consider a responsible business as a career option, the CIEE views entrepreneurship as a broader concept best described as an attitude or a way of relating to the world.

The following definition of entrepreneurship drives many of the CIEE programs and services:

Entrepreneurship is a dynamic and social process where individuals alone or in collaboration identify opportunities for innovation and act upon these by transforming ideas into practical and targeted activities, whether in a social, cultural or economic context. (Inger Karin Røe Ødegård, Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2006)

Our Activities

Promotion and Awareness
Education – Credit
Education – Non-credit
Student Clubs
Support