How Does Innovation Happen? Incorporating Entrepreneurship into Economic Education
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August 24, 2026Innovation is central to economic growth, market competition, and long-run development. Yet economics instruction, especially at the introductory level, often presents innovation as an abstract outcome rather than a dynamic process. Students learn that firms enter markets and disrupt incumbents, but they are rarely shown how innovation unfolds through decision-making under uncertainty or the role of the entrepreneur. This paper presents a classroom-ready instructional framework using the How I Built This podcast to make innovation observable. Drawing on research on relevance, media use, and narrative pedagogy, we map entrepreneurial stories to core economic concepts. Our contribution is pedagogical: providing a scalable, low-cost approach that shifts instruction from what happens to how it happens.
by Jeni Al Bahrani and Abdullah Al Bahrani
Al Bahrani, J., & Al Bahrani, A. (2026). How Does Innovation Happen? Incorporating Entrepreneurship into Economic Education. Available online at Journal of Economics Teaching, DOI: 10.58311/jeconteach/7ec23173275518eb675c9abf21a5ebd9641da66b
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