Doctoral thesis: How to deliver a perfect training programme

In his doctoral thesis, Daniil Pokidko digs into how understanding, or misunderstanding, of our likes and dislikes and their origins can help us towards our goals.

- The power of likes and dislikes pushes a person toward or against something, explains Pokidko. This power makes a person pursue some issues while abandoning the others. It is the same power that makes people persist in something despite the challenges and limitations they encounter, or on the contrary, avoid doing something despite obvious benefits.

Pokidko says that understanding the hidden reasons behind individuals’ feelings may play a decisive role in their pursuits, and this needs to be emphasized within entrepreneurship research and education. He uses his personal example of experiencing entrepreneurship and learning about it in the summary part of his PhD thesis.

Pokidko suggests that, especially in entrepreneurship, the power of likes and dislikes may determine the effort invested in pursuing perceived opportunities and the dedication to this pursuit, regardless of the scarcity of resources.

- Entrepreneurship is often defined as a pursuit of an opportunity. Somehow the academic attention has been predominantly centered on the opportunity, while leaving the actual driver of the entrepreneurial progress – the pursuit – in the shadows. The same could be said about the entrepreneurship education – we cheer and support our students towards the achievement of their goals but poses rather limited tools to help them with connecting their goals and actions to their motivations - he tells.

Pokidko’s research provides educators and students with two such tools - the Experiential Learning Modeling method (ELM) and Experiential Pattern Matching method (EPM).

The ELM method helps educators to trace and model the experiential patterns of each student, provides with the possibility to compare individual patterns and account for their similarities and differences and address any disquieting outliers in a timely manner while identifying participants’ typical, average, or peak experiences.

The EPM method, in turn, provides with the possibility to capture individual input and team-level interaction patterns for a learning experience and focuses on how the recorded individual action patterns influence team dynamics and individual and team-level decision making.

The insights from this research help to plan, deliver, and improve training programs across disciplinary boundaries.

You can read the whole thesis here.

Daniil Pokidko defends his doctoral thesis in Entrepreneurship, Management and Organisation on 18 May at 2 p.m.

Opponent: William B Gartner - Babson College
Chair: Sören Kock

The doctoral defence will be held by video conference. You can access the video conference in Online Teams meeting here.

The video conference opens 18 May at 2 pm.