Entrepreneurship Education: New Perspective on Entrepreneurship Education

Citation

Matlay, H. (2018), "Entrepreneurship Education: New Perspective on Entrepreneurship Education", Education + Training, Vol. 60 No. 7/8, pp. 923-926. https://doi.org/10.1108/ET-08-2018-212

This book is the seventh volume in a reputable series of publications, known as “Contemporary issues in entrepreneurship research”, published jointly by the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship and Emerald Publishing. The current volume is edited by Professors Paul Jones and Gideon Maas from Coventry University, UK and Luke Pittaway from Ohio University, USA. The volume contains an Introduction authored by the editors, and a further 13 chapters, usefully grouped into three main thematic parts. In the Introduction, “New perspectives on entrepreneurship education”, Paul Jones, Gideon Maas and Luke Pittaway outline the rational for the book and provide a brief overview of key aspects of the entrepreneurship education literature.

Part I, “Studies of the impact of entrepreneurship education upon student communities”, critically evaluates the impact of entrepreneurship education upon students involved in this type of specialised education. It comprises four interesting and well researched chapters. In the first chapter, “Learning to evolve: increasing entrepreneurial self-efficacy and putting the market first”, Dermot Breslin reviews the effectiveness of learning-based approaches upon the perceptions and performances of undergraduate students undertaking a specific venture creation module. The author argues that the external environment impacts widely and positively upon student perceptions of emerging entrepreneurial opportunities. In the second chapter, “Educational context and entrepreneurial intentions of university students: an italian study”, Alessandra Tognazzo, Martina Gianecchini and Paolo Gubitta offer insights into students’ perceived entrepreneurial intentions and willingness to commence new ventures. The authors highlight the importance of individual characteristics, and the quality of learning experiences of Italian students, and their intentions upon graduation to engage in new venture creation. Chapter 3, “Undergraduate students’ willingness to start own agribusiness venture after graduation: a Ghanaian case”, authored by Martin Bosompem, Samuel K.N. Dadzie and Edwin Tandoh, explores the determinants of entrepreneurial spirit of agricultural students in Ghana. It emerges that overall entrepreneurship education had a positive impact upon these students’ willingness to become self-employed in the agribusiness sector. In the next chapter, “The impact of modern UK university entrepreneurship & enterprise education on entrepreneurial actions: a case study of Russian student”, Selwyn Seymour and Yuliana Topazly analyse entrepreneurial outcomes related to modern, specialised education in the UK. Interestingly, the authors claim that UK-based entrepreneurship and enterprise education had a positive impact upon Russian students, and proved effective in influencing their entrepreneurial perceptions and behaviour.

The second part of this volume, “Novel entrepreneurship education pedagogy”, comprises five innovative chapters dedicated to various aspects of entrepreneurship education pedagogy. In Chapter 5, Rita G. Clapper and Helle Neergaard suggest that a first step in providing this type of education should entail an understanding of how entrepreneurship education students think. This way, teachers could be more successful in sensitising and transforming students’ mindsets and orient them towards entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial outcomes. In the next chapter, “Creating meaningful entrepreneurial practice: crafting pedagogical awareness”, David Higgins and Deema Refi critically analyse and link entrepreneurship education curriculum to its complex nature and heterogeneous purpose. The authors argue that business schools should aim to develop and enhance the entrepreneurial skills of both existing and future entrepreneurs. In Chapter 7, “Enhanced entrepreneurial learning through visual experiential learning”, Paul Jones, Robert Newbery and Philip Underwood explore the impact of an experiential visual learning curriculum upon students of entrepreneurship. The visual learning solution advocated by the authors, described as “rapid entrepreneurial action”, appears to be particularly effective for the “digital student” generation of would be entrepreneurs. The following chapter, “Ludic executives: the case for play in entrepreneurial learning design”, focuses upon the provision of entrepreneurship education for business executives. Edward Gonsalves and Ricardo Zamora propose an integrative, play based, executive training approach that promises to deliver a more productive entrepreneurship education element for cohorts of business executives. In Chapter 9, “Constructivist entrepreneurial teaching: the TeleCC online approach in Greece”, Alexandros Kakouris provides a critical overview of a student-centric, online approach to entrepreneurial learning in Greece. This chapter makes a useful contribution to the relatively underdeveloped constructivist approach to entrepreneurship education.

There are four further chapters in Part III of this volume, “Entrepreneurship education intervention”. In Chapter 10, “Pan-European entrepreneurial summer academies with impact: the case of startify7”, Dimitris Bibicas, Tim Vorley and Robert Wapshott review the impact of “summer academies” upon entrepreneurship training programmes which are funded by Horizon 2020. Some very useful and constructive insights emerge from this detailed overview. In the next chapter, “Boundary crossing workshops for enterprise education: a capability approach”, Daniele Morselli recommends that the enterprise education aspects of vocational education should be dependent upon students’ capabilities. Chapter 12, “Experiencing business start-up through an enterprise placement year”, authored by Kelly Smith and Philip Clegg, focuses upon a one-year sandwich placement scheme, within which students have an opportunity to develop their business idea and start a new enterprise. In the final chapter, “Designing and delivering inclusive and accessible entrepreneurship education”, Anne M.J. Smith, Declan Jones, Bernadette Scott and Adriano Stadler evaluate the development of an entrepreneurship education initiative in a Higher Education Institute. The authors use an illustrative case study to examine relevant educational assumptions, pedagogical design, participant progression and external stakeholder inputs. Issues relating to inclusivity in, and accessibility to, entrepreneurship education are also discussed in the context of current policy initiatives.

This volume usefully bridges the existing research gap between theory and practice, which still persists within the fast growing and rapidly expanding field of contemporary entrepreneurship education. It contains a number of interesting, well researched and competently written chapters, on a wide range of pertinent aspects related to entrepreneurship education. I would not hesitate, therefore, to recommend this volume as required reading for all the main stakeholders in this topic, including academics, researchers, students, government agencies and policy makers.

This is an interesting book, which makes a substantial contribution to international Entrepreneurship Education as well as to Action Learning topics of research. The editors Marta Peris-Ortiz, Jaime Alonso Gomez, Francisco Velez-Torrez and Carlos Ruenda-Armengot as well as all the authors that contribute to this research monograph are from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, inclusive of Mexico, Spain and Portugal. This is in itself unusual, as most volumes published on this topic tend to be written by authors from Anglo-American universities. In addition to a one page “Forward” authored by Juan Ignacio Guajardo of CETYS University System in Mexicali, Mexico, there are 17 chapters included into this book, but no Introduction and Conclusion chapters, or a List of Contributors. Instead, the names and institutional contact details of contributing authors are given at the bottom of the title page of respective chapters. Due to space and time limitations, I can only provide a brief review of this volume, enough I hope, to highlight its excellent context and the authors’ theoretical and practical contributions to education for entrepreneurship.

In Chapter 1, “Classroom experiments: a useful tool for learning about economic and entrepreneurial decisions”, Javier Perote, Jose David Vincete-Lorente and Jose Angel Zuniga-Vicente provide a discussion of the implementation and advantages of various classroom experiments in teaching as well as learning about entrepreneurial decisions. The authors claim that a variety of entrepreneurship education experiments in a classroom context can contribute positively to the development of both generic and specific decision-making skills. Chapter 2, “An experience in teaching innovation based on collaborative learning and the Aronson Jigsaw Technique”, focuses on an innovative learning technique, which is employed as an alternative to conventional teaching methods. Eugenia Babiloni, Ester Guijarro and Manuel Cardos describe and critically evaluate the application of the Aronson Jigsaw Technique to an undergraduate course which focuses on innovation and competitiveness. In the next chapter, “Learning by teaching and assessing: a teaching experience”, Andreea Apetrei, Jordi Paniagua and Juan Sapena outline a highly innovative teaching experiment that involves student learning about entrepreneurship on the basis of teaching and assessing their peers. The authors argue that this method encourages students to acquire in-depth knowledge and develop skills such as responsibility, critical analysis and empathy. In the following chapter, “DINNO: an innovative technological tool for empowerment in assessment”, Maria Soledad Ibarra-Saiz and Gregorio Rodriguez-Gomez describe and evaluate an experimental tool that can be used innovatively to design assessments. The usefulness of the DINNO tool has been assessed in practice, by questioning 60 university tutors who used it, with apparent positive outcomes across the range. In Chapter 5, “Towards sustainable assessment: ICT as a facilitator of self- and peer-assessment”, Gregorio Rodriguez-Gomez and Maria Soledad Ibarra-Saiz outline an e-assessment experiment that took place at a Spanish university. A survey amongst 108 participant students confirmed that the respondents valued this assessment method, as it helped them develop a range of useful skills.

The topic of Chapter 6 is “Entrepreneurship education: a tool for development of technological innovation”. The authors Carlos Cunha, Barbara Countinho-Pires dos Santos and Almudena Sereno-Ramirez set out to identify, outline and investigate how entrepreneurship can act as a tool in the development of technological innovation in Brazil. In Chapter 7, “Teaching entrepreneurship: a comparison between virtual and classroom teaching contexts”, authors Rosa M. Batista-Canino, Pino Medina-Brito, Silvia Sosa-Cabrera and Alicia Bolivar-Cruz set out to examine aspects relating to entrepreneurship education in two distinct environments. In the following chapter, “Enhancement of entrepreneurship in colombian universities: competence approach plus personalised advice (CAPPA) model”, Antonio Alonso-Gonzalez, Antonio Diaz-Morales and Marta Peris-Ortiz present a novel approach to knowledge transmission in the context of curriculum development in Colombian universities. In the next chapter, “Game driven education in finance through online trading tools”, authors Raul Gomez-Martinez, Camilo Prado-Roman and Sandra Escamilla-Solano provide an overview of a portfolio management activity facilitated by an online game simulator. In Chapter 10, “Educating for entrepreneurship: application to the business services marketing subject”, Sofia Estelles-Miguel, Marta Elena Palmer Gato, Jose Miguel Albarracin Guillem and Carlos Rueda Armengot outline and evaluate several tools that they used to instil an entrepreneurial mindset and to encourage entrepreneurship in students from a Spanish university. The topic of Chapter 11 is “Work and study habits in the interconnected age: what it means for businesses of the future”. In this chapter, Dag Bennett, Diana Perez-Bustamante and Carmelo Mercado-Idoeta set out to investigate the “study habits” of contemporary students, in the context of continuous connectivity, big data availability and the related information overload.

In Chapter 12, “Experiential activities: a tool to increase entrepreneurial skills”, Diana E. Woolfolk-Ruiz and Monica Acosta-Alvarado explore the effectiveness of experimental activities in the classroom, which are aimed at increasing entrepreneurial skill of students. It emerges that experimental and extracurricular activities tend to nourish the participant students’ entrepreneurial spirit. In the next chapter, “Fostering entrepreneurship in higher education, by problem-based learning”, P.I. Santateresa describes a methodology used to teach market research for entrepreneurship. This specific teaching tool is focused on problem-based learning, within the context of tourism. Chapter 14, “Best university practices and tools in entrepreneurship”, focuses upon universities which, in addition to their traditional activities, also promote creative, innovative and entrepreneurial education. Alberto Vaquero-Garcia, Maria de la Cruz del Rio-Rama and Jose Alvarez-Garcia argue for the imperative of entrepreneurship education as part of the mission statement and strategy of modern universities. In the following chapter, “Innovation in entrepreneurship education: developing competitive advantages for MBA students”, Ricardo D. Alvarez Rodriguez and Jorge A. Wise outline an entrepreneurship education programme intended to equip MBA students with entrepreneurial skills and competencies. Marta Peris-Ortiz, Monica Lopez-Sieben and Jaime Alonso-Gomez are the authors of Chapter 16, “Resources and tools of the firm: competencies and entrepreneurship”. The authors provide an in-depth examination of competencies in general and entrepreneurship in particular. In the final chapter, “Entrepreneurship in higher education as a horizontal competence”, Cristina Mesquita, Rui Pedro Lopez and Kristina Bredis investigate entrepreneurial learning as provision of horizontal competences for students in higher education.

This volume provides interested stakeholders with an in-depth insight into the main concepts, methods and outcomes of entrepreneurship education tools that have been developed specifically for countries on the both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, including Mexico, Spain and Portugal. It is an interesting, innovative and useful volume for all those stakeholders who are interested in entrepreneurship education and the relevant tools to best promote and implement it. I would recommend this volume as compelling reading, to stakeholders who have an interest in this topic, such as academics, researchers, government agencies and policy makers.