Meet the RECCO Crew

Hunter Centre academics Lucrezia Casulli, Suzanne Mawson and Sarah Dodd have been involved in an entrepreneurial mindset project aimed at primary age children. Here, Lucrezia shares the research it’s based on and what they hope it achieves. 

In today’s rapidly evolving world, helping children develop an entrepreneurial mindset is just as vital as teaching them literacy or numeracy. An entrepreneurial mindset will help children develop into adults that are not afraid to experiment with new ideas, can think laterally to solve complex problems and can work effectively with others to create novel solutions.

In this sense, an entrepreneurial mindset is not only for new business creation. It is much wider, and it encompasses a set of cognitive, emotional and behavioural skills proven to support young people not only in education and employment but in life more broadly.

Entrepreneurial education has been around for decades, but it typically targets older students and focuses on business and enterprise skills. Instead, when looking at entrepreneurship as a mindset, research suggests that its development is most effective when initiated in early childhood (Malanchini et al., 2024). Meet the RECCO Crew fills that gap by offering entrepreneurial mindset education resources that link to the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) for Primary 1 to Primary 3 pupils.

'Meet the RECCO Crew' is an illustrated book series that turns the abstract entrepreneurial mindset concepts of Resilience, Empathy, Creativity, Collaboration, and Optimism (RECCO) into fun, cartoon characters that children can relate to and learn from in a way that is natural and engaging for them. In ideating the RECCO Crew, we were inspired by approaches like Pixar’s Inside Out, which turns intangible concepts such as emotions into visual and relatable characters for young audiences.

The set of learning resources comprises of two series of short, illustrated books and a teacher’s guide. In the first series, we have 5 books, each introducing one of the 5 characters through short rhyming texts, suitable for Primary 1 children. In the second series of books, all RECCO Crew characters together seek to create different forms of value in contexts characterised by uncertainty, ambiguity and setbacks – entrepreneurial contexts.

The project is funded through the Scottish Government’s Entrepreneurship Education Pathway Fund, where Strathclyde was the only University out of the eight recipients of this highly competitive funding.

From the beginning, we focused on integrating the new resources seamlessly into the Curriculum for Excellence. Instead of creating extra work for teachers, Meet the RECCO Crew supports them to embed entrepreneurial thinking into existing subjects and learning outcomes. This aligns closely with current educational priorities, including the ongoing CfE review and Scotland’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation, which calls for developing “entrepreneurial people and culture.”

As a project team, we have been lucky to have complementary skills and a shared passion for entrepreneurship education. Dr Suzanne Mawson has a deep interest in, and focus on, pedagogy and entrepreneurship education. My interest is firmly on entrepreneurial cognition. Together, we published the book “Entrepreneurial Thinking: Mindset in Action” with Sage. Professor Sarah Dodd has been involved in many projects on entrepreneurship education with a focus on sustainability, community and place, including the EU funded project “Transforming Enterprise Education”.

Above all, what has made the project magical has been working with children’s book illustrator Steve Cox. Steve has a wealth of experience in educational illustration, having worked on projects such The Tower Bridge Cat. His illustrations are colourful, captivating and memorable.

We cannot wait for children all over Scotland to meet the RECCO Crew, get to know the characters and become familiar with them in the way that they are with their favourite book or TV show characters. But that is not all. We hope that, over time, they will seek to emulate the characters’ positive behaviour in their daily lives. The day that children choose not to give up “because Resilience from the RECCO Crew would not” or try something new “just like Creativity from RECCO would”, we will know that the mission has been accomplished!

Project Team: Suzanne Mawson, Lucrezia Casulli, Sarah Dodd, Steve Cox