The global reach of so-called entretainment (Swail et al., 2014) through television programmes such as The Apprentice has created a different set of learner expectations and there is no getting away from it: when they join us, today’s undergraduate students increasingly think that they know what entrepreneurship is, and how it is done. They therefore question the value of much of what we teach and how we teach it with far more incisiveness than did past cohorts.
Partly in response to these new expectations, experiential approaches to teaching entrepreneurship are increasingly being adopted across university curricula at both module (Mason and Arshed, 2013) and at programme (Blackwood et al., 2015) level. The nature of experiential entrepreneurial learning has varied: whereas venture planning has been categorised as experiential (Pittaway and Cope, 2007) there is an emerging trend towards venture action too. This paper focuses on the manifestation of some aspects of entrepreneurial behaviour through the enactment of small scale trading projects