As well as giving you the opportunity to add 'with Proficiency in Entrepreneurship' to your degree title, WPI-E modules include activities and sessions that can count towards the new Exeter Award Entrepreneurship Theme. You can find more information about the 'Exeter Award within Modules' here.
If you have any questions about our ‘with Proficiency in Entrepreneurship’ pathway, please contact WPI-E lead
Other study options
With Proficiency in Entrepreneurship
With Proficiency in Entrepreneurship
With Proficiency in Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship at the University of Exeter
'University of Exeter Undergraduate Students can get ‘with Proficiency in Entrepreneurship’ added to their degree title thanks to the Business School’s unique degree enhancement pathway.
While we are facing an uncertain future full of complex global, social, and environmental issues, more and more employers are looking for graduates in all fields who have additional entrepreneurial skills, and the WPI-E pathway has been designed to help you achieve this no matter your career path.
As well as building your entrepreneurial skills, confidence, and business acumen in order to increase the chances of success in identifying, creating, delivering, and capturing value. The WPI-E pathway prepares you for navigating an uncertain future by teaching crucial interdisciplinary skills, including problem-solving, creative thinking, collaboration, and flexibility, as well as learning to grow from failure as a part of the process.
Entrepreneurs are great at finding solutions to the big and small problems we all face, and we need entrepreneurs in every industry and every company to push the world to be a better place, this pathway enables you to be part of making a difference.
Below are the current modules that you can select within the WPI Entrepreneurship pathway:
This module introduces the student to innovation and entrepreneurship theory and practice. Using case studies, this module delivers foundational knowledge in these subjects. You will explore the histories, theories, and frameworks associated with innovation and entrepreneurship and how they support business growth. The module will consider contemporary urgent global issues such as sustainability and inequity and explore how entrepreneurs are innovating to tackle the sources of these problems. This will all be brought together in a workshop setting where students will apply their new acquired knowledge to build a range of entrepreneurial skills.
Impactful Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a first-year elective that introduces students to design thinking, technology, and the circular economy while building creative confidence. The module seeks to develop your knowledge of innovation within the context of the circular economy. By exploring the latest trends in technology and their relationship to business and sustainability, you will build a stronger contextual understanding with which to apply innovation and entrepreneurship. The lectures will be delivered entirely online and workshop time will be project based and immersive in nature. Through utilising the contemporary practice of design thinking and human centred design, students will explore technology and the emerging concept of the circular economy in order to create impactful solutions.
This module explores what it means to think like an entrepreneur and how individuals in all types of organisations can use entrepreneurial practices to solve problems and create value.
The module’s core component is delivered online and covers research on how entrepreneurs ensure success through the use of entrepreneurial thinking. This is built on in a series of workshops that help the participants to build their entrepreneurial mind-set.
The module is designed to introduce students to how individuals behave entrepreneurially to create sustainable value using their available means. The module’s core components (e.g. Sustainable value creation; Effectual entrepreneurship) are delivered online covering how to explore the feasibility, desirability, and viability of entrepreneurial ideas. We use practice-based approach enabling students to experience the early stages of an entrepreneurial process through the development of their own entrepreneurial idea (which can be based on for-profit or non-profit logic).
Students will be introduced to the fundamentals of business in relation to entrepreneurial value creation. This module is about the core aspects of business including an overview of the impact that entrepreneurship has on the following subjects: accounting and finance, operations, business structures and types, talent management and marketing.
This is a project-based course where students learn by working in a team to launch a real social enterprise that sells a real-life product or service. It provides an opportunity for students to revisit and gain practical experience with the tools and concepts they have learnt in previous entrepreneurship courses (as well as in other business and non-business courses). In addition, this course focuses on helping student practice navigating ambiguity and developing the “soft” business that must be learnt through structured practice. There are no required lectures or formal essays – student time for this class is dedicated to learning through acting in the real world. Online materials (including optional lectures and resources) will be provided to help students as they encounter common issues involved in launching a business. In-person instruction time will focus on creating a classroom “business accelerator” space where students can work through challenges with the instructor, other teams, and additional mentors.
This module is one of a range of modules included in the With Proficiency in Entrepreneurship (WPIE) programme.
This module enhances practical entrepreneurial experiences and action that you have engaged with and enables reflection and the application of entrepreneurial learning gained from these experiences.
Future17 is designed to develop the skills needed to collaboratively tackle 21st Century global challenges and to work with professionals to create pathways towards innovative solutions to real-world issues that relate to one or more of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Future17 enables students to collaborate with learners from a consortium of global partner universities in international, interdisciplinary and multicultural teams to tackle challenges through projects defined by third-party organisations (businesses, charities, NGOs etc.). Students will first undertake an online induction programme that will develop skills for collaborative, challenge-based and inter-cultural learning, which promotes forms of Design Thinking for tackling global challenges. They will then work with academic and third-party mentors to diagnose a sustainable development challenge and develop an approach for developing one or more solutions. They will be assessed on the basis of a 1500 project report and presentation to a panel including representatives of the third-party organisation that set the challenge and academic staff from the partner universities along with other student groups at a showcase event.
These modules have been replaced but are still credit-bearing towards the completion of the WPI-E stream
- BEM2010 Could you be an Entrepreneur
- BEM1020/1020A Innovation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
- BEM2032 Startup Entrepreneurship
- BEM2046 Entrepreneurial Value Creation
- BEM1026 Impactful Entrepreneurship
Further information:
*All efforts have been made to make the pathway available to all undergraduate Exeter students. Students are responsible for opting into WPI Entrepreneurship and ensuring their course allows for the flexibility to complete the required modules. If you are unsure if you have enough modular choice, do check with your programme leader.
New and returning students
Online module selection for new students, for the academic year 2023/24 will be open from the 6th Septmber 2023. You must submit and confirm your selections by 5pm on Friday 6 October 2023. Please note if you do not select your modules by this date they will be allocated for you.
If you have any questions around Online Module Selection or about using the Online Module Selection system please review the student FAQs and user guide below. If you have any questions regarding your module choices, please contact your Hub Info Point. Contact details of the Info Point teams can be found here.
You can select your modules via SRS (Student Records System) either directly here, or via your iExeter.
Undergraduate students successfully passing a minimum of 60 credits (30 credits per year) taken from the approved list of modules can request that ‘with Proficiency in Entrepreneurship’ be added to their degree title, on the recommendation of the relevant Assessment, Progression and Awarding Committee.
For example, a Management student who passes 60 credits of WPIE-E modules can have their degree title amended to BSc (Hons) Management with proficiency in Entrepreneurship.
Modules taken for the ‘With Proficiency in Entrepreneurship’ pathway must be taken at two different levels and must be passed.
Students satisfying these criteria and who wish to be considered for the addition of entrepreneurship proficiency to their degree title should contact their College Office by no later than 1 June of their final year of study to request that this be considered by the Board of Examiners.
If you have no optional module credits available in your programme, the University of Exeter’s Student Startups Team provides a range of non-credit bearing options for learning entrepreneurial skills. For more information see the Student Startups web pages.
If you have any questions about our ‘with Proficiency in Entrepreneurship’ pathway, please contact WPI-E lead, Raphael Dennett R.S.Dennett@exeter.ac.uk.