Editorial: How does entrepreneurship teaching inform entrepreneurship research?

Citation

Murphy, P.J. (2024), "Editorial: How does entrepreneurship teaching inform entrepreneurship research?", Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, Vol. 31 No. 7, pp. 1277-1278. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSBED-11-2024-591

“How does your research inform your teaching?” is a traditional question that tenure-track faculty members often must answer when they are candidates for promotion or tenure at colleges and universities. The question provides candidates the opportunity to showcase the relevance and impact of their scholarship. One answers this question explicitly via personal statements and in meetings with promotion and tenure committees and implicitly via one’s curriculum vita, syllabi and instructor evaluation data. Indeed, an excellent scholar’s research in their field of study should inform their teaching.

In entrepreneurship, as with most fields, research is the source of the original questions and ideas that signify its conceptual domain. Students and entrepreneurs take entrepreneurship classes to learn distinctive concepts they cannot learn anywhere else. As a career pursuit, entrepreneurship entails challenges that other professional paths do not entail. Thus, teaching concepts purely from economics, marketing, management, accounting, as well as other fields outside the business realm, is not enough. Such teaching does not translate into the learning outcomes that students and entrepreneurs need to build better entrepreneurial careers and lead more successful entrepreneurial projects and ventures.

The field of entrepreneurship has come a long way over the past 50 years, thanks to the pioneering contributions of early entrepreneurship scholars. Today, growth-laden phenomena, dynamic uncertainties in markets, communities and institutional settings, individual passions, personal values, social purpose and external problems all underlie the formal constructs that define the field. Entrepreneurship engages important research questions better than any other field can. On these grounds, thanks to pioneers of our field and to the popularity of entrepreneurship programs at universities today, the traditional question of how one’s research informs one teaching is easier to answer.

Flipping the script

The traditional question will remain important for the foreseeable future. However, the entrepreneurship field has begun to flip the script. As the field evolves and its impact grows, the effect of research on teaching is rebounding. Entrepreneurship teaching is informing entrepreneurship research. Scholars glean insights into entrepreneurship research that they cannot get anywhere else from their own students, including ones who go on to be incredibly successful entrepreneurs.

Teachers and students explore interesting realms in entrepreneurship education programs. We know that meeting the challenges of entrepreneurship requires formal, endogenous coordination both inside and outside an entrepreneurial firm. Entrepreneurship research shows that venture performance in such circumstances entails holistic and organic aspects that frustrate the siloed theoretic assumptions of the industrial-organizational (IO) paradigm. Similarly to how entrepreneurial performance spans these boundaries, entrepreneurship research synthesizes concepts from other fields. This integration is most applicable in the domain of business studies, where traditional IO functional areas yield provincial views on complex entrepreneurial phenomena. When it comes to pedagogy, a scholar must teach these notions to students and entrepreneurs in order to prepare them to meet the challenges of entrepreneurship.

So how exactly do scholars learn from the students and entrepreneurs whom they teach? It has long been said one truly learns a topic only when one teaches it to others. This maxim is especially powerful in entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is a personal pursuit. Unique activities are important to entrepreneurial success. All persons – including students and entrepreneurs – are patently unique. Thus, diversity is visibly germane to entrepreneurship. Moreover, the diversity one finds in entrepreneurship programs is usually very rich. The students reflect myriad identities such as the formerly incarcerated, returning citizens, differently abled, wealthy family backgrounds, immigrants, refugees, veterans, neurodivergent, different genders, various religions and cultures, homeless and unhoused and many more identities and categories.

Individuals outside the mainstream are often attracted to entrepreneurship. Such a mix of personal gifts in one environment, combined with the notion that a unique personal identity is important to entrepreneurial success, leads to distinct insights into familiar and traditional concepts. When those insights are focused on the challenges of managing growth and navigating uncertainty – challenges that affect people in highly personal ways – the insights are so unique that one cannot get them anywhere else. The question is how to structure entrepreneurship educational programs to bring forth those distinct insights most effectively.

Entrepreneurship scholars can learn much from students by teaching entrepreneurship concepts in ways that intentionally encourage the contribution of their unique perspectives. Building strong and inclusive learning communities is essential. Classes and programs can be structured to allow students to use their own entrepreneurial projects and businesses as part of the learning experience. Radically innovative activities and avant-garde extracurricular programming can complement traditional course offerings. As the larger environments (markets, communities and institutional settings) in which entrepreneurship occurs change over time, insights from students and entrepreneurs can help scholars discover new research questions that are novel, relevant and unavailable elsewhere. As technological advances become more profound, the novelty and relevance of such insights will magnify.

Socrates, one of the greatest teachers, is said to have believed that everything a student ever needs to know is already inside them. For him, the interaction between a wise teacher and a curious student is what brings forth that breakthrough knowledge. In a similar kind of way, entrepreneurship teaching informs the scholars who are undertaking entrepreneurship research. After all, one learns something best by teaching it to others. Entrepreneurship scholars can discover valuable opportunities to make breakthrough research contributions by teaching entrepreneurship concepts to students and entrepreneurs.