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The purpose of this paper is to present the question and answer (Q/A) to provide an opportunity for two seasoned academic business librarians to share their experiences with courses in entrepreneurship in their universities.

Question and answer.

The evolving business school curricular landscape, and especially an increase in courses in entrepreneurship, presents unique opportunities for engagement, visibility and centrality for academic business librarians.

Entrepreneurship is increasingly valued in today’s world. To be successful, entrepreneurs must successfully deal with and navigate a highly complex information landscape. Academic business librarians are positioned to help student, faculty and future entrepreneurs alike learn the skills to successfully traverse this landscape.

Entrepreneurship education particularly requires student engagement because of the complexity of the entrepreneurship process. The purpose of this paper is to describe how an established measure of engagement can be used to identify relevant teaching methods that could be used to engage any group of entrepreneurship students.

The Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) instrument was used to provide 47 well established engagement criteria. The results from 393 students (33 per cent response rate), and the identification by immersed experts of the criteria that were present in each of six teaching methods, made it possible to calculate a weighted score of engagement contribution for each teaching method.

This method described in this paper identified, for undergraduate entrepreneurship students, the most engaging teaching methods as well as the least engaging. This approach found that from amongst the particular range of teaching methods in the courses in this case study, poster reports was the most engaging, followed by a team‐based learning method. This approach also identified one teaching method that was not engaging, suggesting it could be discontinued.

These results give entrepreneurship educators with access to engagement data collected by the National Study of Student Engagement (NSSE), or the equivalent AUSSE study, a practical method for assessing and identifying teaching methods for student engagement for their particular profile of students, and in their particular teaching situation.

The application of established measures of engagement is novel and provides insights into specific teaching methods for enhancing the engagement of particular groups of students at the course level. It is a method that could be applied in fields other than entrepreneurship education where NSSE or AUSSE data is available.

Common pedagogical approaches to entrepreneurship education include business plan writing, case studies, consulting, and simulations. Yet, in effect, these learning vehicles are simply proxies for the venture launch process. Operating under the assumption that learning entrepreneurship is a complex endeavor best addressed by a portfolio of pedagogical techniques, some instructors have experimented with launching student businesses in addition to traditional approaches.The challenge is how to do this with inexperienced undergraduate students within the confines of a 15-week semester. Included in the article are an outline of the process, a qualitative assessment of student learning, and suggestions for further research.

The purpose of this research paper is to explore the decline of subsistence entrepreneurship in a “Scottish Fishing Community”, namely the village of Gourdon in Kincardineshire, Scotland over a 60‐year period.

Presents the material in a historical perspective, as remembered by two persons who lived through the experience. Using two ethnographic accounts the paper reconstructs a vivid picture of a thriving form of subsistence type entrepreneurship, in a bygone era, when enterprise was more closely bonded to community activities, the work ethic and pride.

This paper narrates a dramatic story relating to the economic decline visited upon a living community by the forces of market change affecting multiple income streams. In this tale, there are no heroes or villains, as is normal in narrative accounts, merely victims of changing circumstances and changing patterns of social action.

The results of this research paper have obvious limitations, because of the methodology employed, and because of the limited number of respondents interviewed. However, socio‐historical studies such as this have their place in developing an understanding of entrepreneurship as enacted in individual communities.

This paper tackles an under‐researched area of rural entrepreneurship using narrative methods which bring the subject to life.

This study aims to examine the role of gender balance in forming individuals’ understanding of entrepreneurship as manifested in the graduates’ occupational choices, asking: Does gender balance in entrepreneurship education influence start-up behaviour after graduation? Based on gender mainstreaming, this study builds on the assumption that gender balance influences classroom and student community discourses. This study presents two hypotheses suggesting a positive relationship between gender balance (student and mentor gender balance, respectively) and the likelihood of engaging in start-up behaviour after graduation.

The context is an international one-year master's programme in entrepreneurship and innovation, which adopts an experienced-based pedagogical approach to support learning. This study applies binary logistic regression analysis to test the hypotheses on a sample of 107 graduates who responded to a web-based questionnaire on post-graduation career paths.

This study finds support for the first hypothesis indicating that student gender balance in the classroom has a significant positive impact on graduates' likelihood of engaging in start-up activity post-graduation. In the interpretation of these findings, this study emphasizes that a master's programme in entrepreneurship is an important arena where students' attitudes, values, aspirations and intentions towards entrepreneurship are shaped and their identity developed.

While studies have demonstrated gender bias in the discourses on entrepreneurship education and content, there is little evidence of its consequences or how it is addressed. Findings of this study point directly to this gap by revealing that improved gender balance is not only beneficial to the underrepresented gender, but to the overall student group.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on individual entrepreneurial intention (IEI) by assessing the importance of entrepreneurship education to students in vocational training programmes and using the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to analyse these students’ entrepreneurial intentions. The family background of the students and their exposure to entrepreneurship subject matter were included as antecedents of TPB components and IEI.

To test the research model, the primary data were collected with questionnaires distributed to students in their last year of vocational training programmes with and without entrepreneurship coursework, in a region of Northern Portugal. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The results show that TPB dimensions substantially contribute to explaining students’ IEI. However, their family background makes only a minor contribution, and exposure to entrepreneurship education has no influence on IEI.

Given these results, the authors propose a broader discussion is needed of the importance of introducing business classes into the curricula of vocational training programmes.

This research’s results show that IEI models need to assign greater importance to variables related to previous exposure to entrepreneurial experiences through direct family members. The findings contribute to a fuller understanding of IEI and the factors that precede the formation of this intention among students in training programmes.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how the graphic organizer the Business Model Canvas can be used as a platform for business information literacy instruction.

This paper is a case study of the application of the Business Model Canvas in business information literacy instruction in an academic setting.

Entrepreneurship students can struggle to differentiate between the purposes of databases and to integrate research findings into the planning of their business. The Business Model Canvas (BMC) provides a common framework for entrepreneurship students to understand the different purposes of the many information sources available and imposes the iterative process of making and testing assumptions against research.

The findings discussed here are used in business and entrepreneurship classes, and thus far this process has been used with that group in mind. This case study also discusses relatively new processes; the teaching described has not yet been rigorously assessed.

This process gives students practice integrating library resources into their work and understanding the use of specific resources. This model for instruction could be applied to business information literacy in entrepreneurship classes and courses in other disciplines which also incorporate project planning.

This process has the potential to improve the opportunity assessment process for student entrepreneurs and to enrich information-seeking practices for entrepreneurs.

Little has been written about the use of graphic organizers to differentiate between information resources. This research helps address this gap, while also helping to further explore how entrepreneurship students can best use library resources while developing their business plans.

This research paper aims to examine how organized criminals rescript their identities to engage with entrepreneurship discourse when authoring their biographies. From a sociological perspective, stereotypes and social constructs of the entrepreneur and the criminal are subjects of recurring interest. Yet, despite the prevalence of the stereotype of the entrepreneur as a hero-figure in the entrepreneurship literature and the conflation of the entrepreneur with the stereotype of the businessman, notions of entrepreneurial identity are not fixed with constructions of the entrepreneur as a rascal, rogue or villain being accepted as alternative social constructs.

The qualitative approaches of “biographical analysis” and “close reading” adopted help us draw out discursive strategies.

The main finding is that a particular genre of criminal biographies can be re-read as entrepreneur stories. The theme of nuanced entrepreneurial identities and in particular gangster discourse is under researched. In this study, by conducting a close reading of contemporary biographies of British criminals, the paper encounters self-representations of criminals who seek to author an alternative and more appealing social identity as entrepreneurs. That this re-scripting of personal biographies to make gangster stories conform to the genre of entrepreneur stories is of particular interest.

This study points to similarities and differences between criminal and entrepreneurial biographies. It also presents sociological insights into an alternative version of entrepreneurial identity and sociological constructions of the criminal as entrepreneur.

This research provides an insight into how criminals seek to legitimise their life-stories.

This research paper is of value in that it is the first to consider contemporary biographies of British criminals as entrepreneurship discourse. Understanding how criminal biographies and entrepreneur stories share similar socially constructed themes, storylines and epistemologies contribute to the development of entrepreneurship and sociological research by examining entrepreneurship in an unusual social setting.

As a social construct, entrepreneurship is portrayed as an unashamedly masculine endeavour. This forms the basis for much feminist research in entrepreneurship. Despite a sustained research effort in the field of gendered entrepreneurship research this polarised viewpoint remains under researched from the perspective of masculinity. Rather than perpetuate the polarity this short article aims to consider the concept of gendered entrepreneurial regimes as an explanatory variable.

Using documentary analysis techniques this article seeks to document the existence of a particular gendered local regime in the form of “Essex‐Boy culture”.

The findings although tentative indicate that as a recognised gendered local regime Essex‐Boy identity manifests itself physically at a conceptual, gendered, geographic, community and cultural level. Semiotically it can be expressed as a legitimate business identity, a criminal identity, a celebrity status, a political identity, as parody, caricature and as metaphor. It can be expressed as an ideology, a doxa, class position, a culture or as an initiating dream. It also exists at a narrative level via memoires, biographies, jokes or scripted insult.

Given that this is a preliminary study based on secondary documents there is clearly scope for other studies to be conducted into this interesting phenomenon.

The study has implications for what can be legitimately studied under the rubric of gendered entrepreneurial research.

This study is original in its exclusive use of documentary research/analysis to uncover gendered aspects of an under studied entrepreneurial regime.

With the growing financial crisis and collapse of the bubble economy of Japan, small, innovative, companies can offer the catalyst the economy needs. Yet the traditional culture of Japan, its educational system, and entrenched employment and promotion practices have not encouraged risk‐taking. This exploratory study surveys Japanese managers' views on entrepreneurship as well as the challenges that face their own personal self‐employment. Results indicate the lack of a risk‐taking culture as well as fear of failure will continue to hinder rapid new business start‐ups in Japan in the coming future. Findings include ways to encourage entrepreneurship intraditional companies.