Linking entrepreneurship education to graduate entrepreneurship

Citation

Matlay, H. (2010), "Linking entrepreneurship education to graduate entrepreneurship", Education + Training, Vol. 52 No. 8/9. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.2010.00452haa.001

Linking entrepreneurship education to graduate entrepreneurship

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Education + Training, Volume 52, Issue 8/9

About the Guest EditorDr Harry MatlayProfessor of Small Business and Enterprise Development at the Birmingham City Business School in Birmingham, UK. He specialises in Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development as well as in Entrepreneurship Education, Training and Learning. He pioneered research in e-Business and e-Entrepreneurship in the UK and has published several articles that focus on this emerging aspect of small business development. Prior to joining the Birmingham City Business School he worked in senior positions in industry and commerce, as an entrepreneur and business consultant and at the SME Centre at Warwick University, where he edited the EC SME Observatory and undertook teaching, supervision and various small business-related research and consultancy projects. He joined the Birmingham City Business School in January 1998. He is the Editor of the Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development (JSBED), Guest Editor of an annual double special issue in Education + Training and a special issue on Entrepreneurship Education in the Industry & Higher Education Journal. He is on the Editorial Advisory Board of several international journals and has refereed articles, books and research monographs for major publishing houses, including Routledge, Sage, Palgrave and Oxford University Press. He has written, presented and published over 300 refereed journal articles, practitioner features and conference papers and won several prestigious national and international awards. In 2003 he was awarded the Golden Page prize in the research relevance category for his editorial work on JSBED. Currently, he is working with colleagues at various universities in the UK and abroad on research linking enterprise and entrepreneurship education to entrepreneurial outcomes and stakeholders’ expectations in this important area of economic activity.

Governments across the developed and developing world increasingly promote entrepreneurship as the “engine” of economic development and widely acknowledge its crucial role in wealth as well as job creation. In recent years, creativity and innovation have also been added to the long list of entrepreneurial attributes, which, individually and cumulatively, are perceived to safeguard the stability and integrity of the socio-economic and political infrastructure of nations. This view has been reinforced in recent years by the publication of a number of prestigious and wide ranging reports, including “Fostering Entrepreneurship” (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1998), the European Commission’s Green Paper “Entrepreneurship in Europe” (European Commission, 2003) and an impressive portfolio of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor publications (see Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 2010). In this context nurturing, supporting and encouraging entrepreneurship at all levels of society has become a topic of highest priority in government policy making. Higher education institutions (HEIs), in particular, have been singled out as the main source of more and better educated entrepreneurs, who are ready and willing to enter an economy and make it more “entrepreneurial” (for a detailed review, see Matlay, 2011). Potentially, graduate entrepreneurs represent an important national resource, both in terms of numbers and the quality of their contribution. It should be noted, however, that despite its relatively long history, entrepreneurship education, as a research topic, is still in its infancy and therefore lacks legitimacy as well as critical mass. This special issue focuses upon linking contemporary entrepreneurship education research to graduate entrepreneurial outcomes and, in the process, makes an empirically rigorous contribution to the rich and heterogeneous body of specialist knowledge.

In the opening article Gary Packham, Paul Jones, Christopher Miller, David Pickernell and Brychan Thomas set out to examine the impact that enterprise education can have on entrepreneurial attitudes in France, Germany and Poland. The authors found that enterprise education has a positive impact upon the entrepreneurial attitudes of French and Polish students. In contrast, enterprise education appears to have a negative influence on male German students. Interestingly, whilst female students were more likely to perceive a greater benefit from the learning experience, the impact of enterprise education on entrepreneurial attitudes was more significant for male students. In the following article Hytti, Stenholm, Heinonen and Seikkula-Leino evaluate the impact of motivation to study entrepreneurship on individual levels of performance, in terms of the generation of business ideas. It emerges that intrinsic motivation has a negative effect on entrepreneurial learning outcomes and extrinsic motivation impacts positively on ideas generation. The effect of team dynamics positively moderates the relationship between intrinsic motivation and entrepreneurial learning outcomes.

In the third article, Henry and Treanor explore the potential of entrepreneurship education within veterinary medicine. The results of their research show that entrepreneurship education has the potential to make a valuable contribution to graduate entrepreneurship in veterinary medicine. The majority of veterinary graduates will work, own or co-own a veterinary business at some stage in their career. The next paper focuses on the role of electronic simulation case studies as used in entrepreneurship education. Tunstall and Lynch evaluate both their effectiveness and relationship to more traditional approaches to experiential learning. According to the authors, students found electronic simulation case studies to be immersive and also more engaging than the traditional case study method used by entrepreneurship educators. In the fifth article Hussain, Scott and Matlay explore the impact of entrepreneurship education on succession in ethnic minority family firms operating in the UK economy. The authors argue that entrepreneurship education as provided by UK HEIs is insufficiently customised to the specific needs of ethnic minority graduates. Effective entrepreneurship education emerges as crucial to the survival and growth of ethnic minority family businesses in the UK and also contributes positively to ownership transfer in these firms.

In the sixth article Penaluna, Coates and Penaluna set out to evaluate design-based pedagogies and cognitive approaches that develop innovative mindsets. The authors investigate their propensity for adoption in entrepreneurship education. Their research shows that design-based entrepreneurship pedagogies embed “right brain” cognitive approaches which could, if adopted, enrich current entrepreneurship education practice. The next article focuses upon problem encountered in evaluating the impact of enterprise modules in the context of HRD research. In their study, Harte and Stewart encountered a number of evaluation problems, some of which contradicted previous findings published in the specialist literature. In the eighth paper, Carey and Matlay explore how creative disciplines education is taught, delivered and assessed, and how it might inform the development of enterprise education in UK HEIs. The authors found that delivery styles and ideas assessment in the creative sector represent a useful model, which could be adopted by generic enterprise education in UK business schools as well as other non-business faculties. In the next article, Marco van Gelderen evaluates a vision of entrepreneurship education that has the student’s capacity for autonomous action as its ultimate aim. The author argues that autonomy is important in the context of entrepreneurial motivation, satisfaction and increased individual self-reliance. He further suggests that for effective entrepreneurship education, educators need to adopt individualised and empowering approaches. In the final paper of this special issue Bridge, Hegarty and Porter explore what entrepreneurship means for the promoters of entrepreneurship education and what might be appropriate for those students who benefit from it. Using NICENT (The Northern Ireland Centre for Entrepreneurship) at the University of Ulster as an illustrative case study, the authors explore the requirements of various stakeholders involved in entrepreneurship education and reflect on the need to reconcile them.

Finally, I would like to thank all the contributors, referees and advisors who made possible the publication of the 11th special issue in the series. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Rick Holden, who is retiring after 20 years as Editor of Education + Training. I owe a great deal to Rick and his hard work, commitment and expertise during his long and productive Editorship of this influential journal. I wish him the best of luck for the future and sincerely hope that he would continue his prolific research and related dissemination in the area of graduate entrepreneurship.

Harry Matlay