Search results

Entrepreneurial education is the process of providing individuals with the ability to recognise commercial opportunities and the insight, self‐esteem, knowledge and skills to act on them. It includes instruction in opportunity recognition, commercialising a concept, marshalling resources in the face of risk, and initiating a business venture. It also includes instruction in traditional business disciplines such as management, marketing, information systems and finance. The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and introduction of a new programme in entrepreneurship at the University of Tasmania. Within this programme the process and responsibility of learning has largely been reversed through the process of student centred learning. This method of learning represents a challenging departure from traditional mainstream teaching practices. In considering the benefits achievable from this teaching method, this paper also considers the difficulties in transferring increased responsibility to students to manage their futures.

The world is changing very rapidly with events that alter the landscape for students during a time when entrepreneurs are needed more than ever. This chapter explores trends in entrepreneurship research that are focused in areas of the entrepreneurial mindset, alleviation of poverty through entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, portfolio thinking about entrepreneurial venture types, the crucial nature of racial diversity, and the drive of women entrepreneurs. It also examines COVID-19’s disparate impact on smaller ventures and Black entrepreneurs, while highlighting its impact on spurring entrepreneurial innovations causing an entrepreneurial explosion. Most importantly, this chapter focuses on how the emerging research trends amidst the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted entrepreneurship educators to enact educational innovations. The chapter includes tools and tips to integrate into the changing nature of university programs and entrepreneurship curriculums facing a dynamic future.

Entrepreneurship education is observed as expanding in both academic and informal settings. Drawing on the Business Schools paradigm, relevant courses deliver contiguous knowledge and competencies applicable to new business creation based on cognitive and experiential instruction. Germane studies explore the entrepreneurial intention of trainees as a consequence of the pursued instruction. This chapter follows a more student-centric perspective which supposes the underlying cognitive schemes of trainees and their evolution as primordial structures that are affected through learning. This focus turns the approach into pure constructivism where the Piagetian concepts of assimilation and accommodation underpin learning. Based on a coherent constructivist online environment, that is the TeleCC platform in Greece, evidence for reflection, critical thinking and meta-learning incidents is investigated amongst the trainees’ dialogues and comments. The appearance of these processes verifies the dynamics of constructivist learning and Piaget’s equilibration process. There has been minimal attention in research so far into genuine constructivist signatures relevant to entrepreneurial learning; a gap that motivated the research of this chapter. The features of the learning environment and the facilitating role for the educator are crucial presuppositions for deep constructivist learning processes to occur. Else, instructional interventions favour the customary guidance and knowledge or experience transfer. It is maintained that the constructivist approach is an underdeveloped yet innovative perspective for educational research in entrepreneurship that needs good examples and contextualisation of relevant concepts and processes. Its contribution will be especially important and inclusive for the lifelong learning domain where adult learners participate in with repositories of personal life experiences and crystallised and resistant conceptualisations for the phenomena under consideration.

While the number of entrepreneurship education programmes offered around the world is on the rise, research into the assessment of entrepreneurship education programmes is still lacking. The purpose of this paper is to take the stance that entrepreneurship education has to focus on a set of transversal competences aimed at teaching individuals to become more enterprising, and develop a framework and practical proposal for the teaching and assessment of entrepreneurial competences.

The authors followed a three-pronged research design. First, the authors reviewed the literature and practices on the definition of entrepreneurial competences and measures for their assessment and identified a rubric of competences and a set of assessment tools. Second, the authors tested the identified tools to assess entrepreneurial competences through the development of an intensive extra-curricular initiative on entrepreneurship based on a business model challenge. Third, the authors evaluated the outcomes of this experience based on 72 student pre-test and post-test survey responses.

The authors assessed the impact of participation in a business model challenge with regard to five competence areas: positive attitude and initiative; communication and interaction; team-work and collaboration; critical and analytical thinking or problem solving, including risk assessment; creativity and innovation. The authors found no relevant changes across these dimensions, concluding that the mere exposure to the business challenge was not a sufficient condition for stimulating the development of entrepreneurial competences in our sample.

This work provides a relevant contribution to researchers, educators and policymakers by taking an interdisciplinary approach to reviewing previous literature and proposing ways of assessing transversal competences in the context of entrepreneurship education.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the current state of arts entrepreneurship education at higher educational institutions (HEIs) in the UK and Germany. It is based on findings from questionnaire surveys among 210 lecturers in fine art at 89 HEIs in the UK and Germany.

This paper explores issues related to fine art curriculum in higher education in the UK and Germany via survey questionnaires among 210 fine art lecturers with focus on arts entrepreneurship.

The study shows evidence that an arts entrepreneurship education, although considered by lecturers to be important and necessary for the professional and entrepreneurial preparation of fine art graduates, is definitely not implemented at HEIs, in neither the UK nor Germany.

The findings stimulate the discussion in the field of arts entrepreneurship and the redesigning of fine art curriculum to prepare fine art graduates for their entrepreneurial and professional careers.

There is still a marked paucity of research that focusses on arts entrepreneurship education. This study contributes to the knowledge by presenting specific findings related to fine art curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the context, approach and teaching techniques used for entrepreneurship education need to reflect the different roles that encompass enterprise.

The authors analyse and reflect upon what attributes, qualities, skills and knowledge are required for the different roles involved in entrepreneurship.

From the analysis the authors identify role typologies and argue that teaching entrepreneurship needs to produce a combination of the creative talents of the artist, the skills and ability of the artisan, yet include the applied knowledge of the technician with the know‐what of the professional. The authors then present some examples of pedagogies in entrepreneurship that might be used to develop the skills required for these roles.

The authors demonstrate why the teaching of entrepreneurship requires a combination of theory and practice.

The paper shows that a different approach to understanding entrepreneurial pedagogy may be useful for educators and students.

This paper seeks to provide an analytical overview of the current state of entrepreneurship education in the USA for the years 2004‐2005.

The author performed an extensive review of the literature in entrepreneurship education and enhanced the review by conducting a national survey of two and four‐year colleges and universities. This survey was the sixth since 1979 conducted by the author to examine trends and the “current state of entrepreneurship education.”

The 2004‐2005 survey indicates that the trends, especially in the use of technology initially examined in prior national studies of entrepreneurship, have continued in a similar direction and in some areas, for example, the use of technology has increased dramatically. Also, new findings confirm that the traditional teaching method of requiring students to create a business plan is still used and is popular. Finally, the data show that entrepreneurship educators are increasingly using guest speakers and class discussions more frequently than the traditional approach of class lectures.

The national survey resulted in 270 schools responding. The survey findings cannot be generalized to all schools in the USA, although there are no other samples of this size. The evaluation and interpretation of some of the findings represent the author's own perceptions and experiences, and should, therefore, be viewed with caution.

Provides an evaluation of the state‐of‐the‐art of entrepreneurship education in the USA.

The aim of this paper is to reveal and investigate differences in how Finnish student teachers understand entrepreneurship education and how critical they are of it. The research question is: what kind of critical understanding do student teachers reveal in their conception of entrepreneurship education?

A qualitative research approach termed content analysis was used to investigate student teacher’s conceptions. The data were collected from essays written by 257 student teachers at the University of Turku’s, Rauma teacher education department during 2010-2012.

The conception of entrepreneurship education is, in many ways, related to how much one already knows about entrepreneurship education or how one reacts to it. It seems that most student teachers’ conceptions of entrepreneurship are positive, but even those in favour of it, in principle, do not necessarily want to see entrepreneurship education included in the basic education curriculum. Nevertheless, they think that enterprising pedagogy is useful and that the way of thinking about teaching is inspiring. They also feel that both teacher education and basic education benefit from some kind of entrepreneurship component, but do not take entrepreneurship education for granted. On the basis of this study, it is proposed that teacher education should incorporate more teaching that supports critical thinking in all study modules.

The findings of this study illustrate that there is much more to do in teacher education and its curricula. Teaching situations and learning situations are always social situations and both learners and teachers have a vital role to play.

This chapter considers the role of entrepreneurship theory in the development of ideation techniques for entrepreneurship education. It begins by considering how metatheories impact theory construction in entrepreneurship research and discusses the role of ontology, epistemology, axiology, as well as the role of assumptions about human nature and social change. The chapter presents four different paradigms of thought that apply different philosophies and illustrates how these different paradigms conceptualize entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial opportunity differently. The four paradigms include the equilibrium paradigm, the disequilibrium paradigm, the disruptive innovation paradigm, and the social constructionism paradigm. Within each paradigm, the nature of entrepreneurial opportunity is discussed, and the chapter provides examples to show how different ideation techniques can be generated from these different conceptualizations. Forms of ideation technique are presented and explained, as they relate to each paradigm, and the chapter concludes by explaining the value of these techniques for ideation, opportunity discovery, and creation, in the entrepreneurial process.

This paper aims to refer to the knowledge transfer of entrepreneurial skills between digital incubators and nascent entrepreneurs. It questions the role of the context and of the richness of the ecosystems in which these women evolve, as defined by Welter and Baker (2021) on such an attempt.

This research is based on a qualitative study that refers to case studies of women nascent entrepreneurs who evolve into two different contexts – one rich zone and one deprived economic one of the French Parisian Region – and who integrated the same digital incubator.

Context does partly matter: besides the “Where”, the “Who” and, moreover, the level of education and previous entrepreneurial experience really matters, and only educated women, whatever the other components of context, seem to be capable to receive the “best” knowledge transfer from incubators. Second, incubators can be considered as to be a knowledge hub that allow knowledge transfer not only from trainers and coaches to women nascent entrepreneurs but also among women entrepreneurs. This paper concludes with a discussion on the role of digital training and coaching in such knowledge transfers.

Findings are limited to a specific place (the region of Paris). Therefore, women entrepreneurs evolve in more different contexts but the national entrepreneurial and institutional context remains the same. There should be need to explore the role of an incubator that evolves into more contrasted contexts.

If results can be generalized, this means incubators should differentiate their services, teaching and coaching expertize according to the education level of nascent entrepreneurs: This is a plaidoyer against institutionalized incubators that claim to be capable of targeting any nascent (women) entrepreneurs.

This study is also a plaidoyer for more digital incubator to mix persons from different contexts, especially to welcome persons from more deprived economic zones.

The research reveals the role of context – and, some components of the context – intro coaching and training that are provided by online incubators. It contributes to the literature on knowledge transfer that is brought about by incubators. It also contributes to the literature in entrepreneurship by showing that some components among the others that define what we call “the context” matter more than others.