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This paper investigates the importance of team formation in entrepreneurship education, and the authors ask: how do different team formation strategies influence teamwork in higher education experiential learning-based entrepreneurship courses?

Employing a multiple case study design, the authors examine 38 student teams from three different entrepreneurship courses with different team formation paths to uncover potential links between team formation and learning outcomes.

The authors find that team formation mode matters. Randomly assigned teams, while diverse, struggle with handling uncertainty and feedback from potential stakeholders. In contrast, student self-selected teams are less diverse but more robust in handling this pressure. Results suggest that in randomly assigned teams, the entrepreneurial project becomes the team's sole reference point for well-being. Seeking to protect the project, the team's ability to deal with uncertainty and external feedback is limited, stifling development. In student self-select teams, team well-being becomes a discrete reference point. This enables these teams to respond effectively to external project feedback while nurturing team well-being independently.

Education theories' implications about the benefit of team diversity may not apply to experiential learning-based entrepreneurship education's typical level of ambiguity and uncertainty. Therefore, educators may have to reconsider the unique dynamics of team formation strategies to ensure strong teamwork and teamwork outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the social construction of gendered subjects in entrepreneurship education (EEd), through the analysis of course descriptions. For this purpose, the analytical constructs of the Fictive Student and the Fictive Entrepreneur are developed.

Through analysis of 86 course descriptions from 81 universities in 21 countries, this study examines the degree to which course descriptions use gendered language, how such language constructs gendered subjects, and the resultant implications.

This paper finds that course descriptions are predominantly, but not exclusively, masculine in their language. More importantly, the distribution of feminine and masculine language is uneven across course descriptions. Context variables such as regional or national culture differences do not explain this distribution. Instead, the phenomenon is explained by course content/type; whereby practice-based entrepreneurship courses are highly masculine, compared to traditional academic courses, where students learn about entrepreneurship as a social phenomenon.

Universities and educators have not taken into account recent research about the real and possible negative consequences of positioning entrepreneurship in a stereotypical, masculinized fashion. This may offer an inexpensive opportunity to improve recruitment and description accuracy.

The paper’s contribution is fourfold. First, it contributes to debates on the gendering of entrepreneurship by extending these into EEd. Second, it extends Sarasvathy’s (2004) concern with barriers to, rather than incentives for, entrepreneurship to include EEd. Third, it contributes to the emerging literature on entrepreneurship as practice, by highlighting the masculization of EEd, as it gets closer to practice and the role of language in this. Finally, it highlights the gendered implications of English medium courses.

The purpose of this paper is to ask: what effect does moving from individual to collective understandings of the entrepreneur in enterprising education have on the student’s learning? And given this shift in understanding, is there a need for a new paradigm in entrepreneurship learning?

This paper draws on ethnographic data from entrepreneurship education (EEd) at a summer school in Denmark. The purpose of the summer school was to bring the students from an awareness of their own competences to a shared understanding of resources, relationships and opportunities for becoming enterprising.

Drawing on the recent developments in understanding creativity, the authors’ explore the potential for similarities between becoming an entrepreneur in collaboration with others and being creative in collaboration with others. The authors’ found that a focus on the collaborative and distributed character of entrepreneurship, as within the We-paradigm from creativity, does not exclude the importance of perceptions of individuals’ self-images as part of a course in entrepreneurship. Yet, a reformulation of these could be an entry point for richer group work and articulation of diverse group potential.

This study suggests that it is possible to take at least one step further in what can be achieved during an EEd course. Rather than remain a focus on individual learning and treating group work a didactics instrument, team formation processes can be used as a pedagogy/andragogy experiential tool in the classroom with its own learning outcomes, as presented and discussed above. For educators, this means that they have an additional tool to aid the complicated task of bringing EEd to students across campus. For students, this new approach means that the often dreaded and frustrating process of classroom team formation can become a positive experience of purposeful team assembly and collaboration. Two possible limitations regarding the findings of this paper can be identified: for students with extensive experience in forming teams and working in groups, taking them through this process may not have the desired effect as they may rely on habits and known mechanism without much reflection; it may be difficult to achieve the desired effect with students that know each other well before the course starts, as they may have too strong hidden agendas about who they want to work with and who they do not want to work with that this will over-power the idea/opportunity/subject-matter driven approach (Aldrich and Kim, 2007). Educators should consider if they may be subject to these limitations as this may have an effect on the use of active, opportunity-driven team formation in practise. To counter the second limitation, educators may want to consider how far into a course they want to facilitate the team formation; especially for courses running over significantly longer periods than two weeks. Future research may be able to assess the significance of these limitations.

This paper explores how students experience and handle a shift from an individual to a collaborative understanding of entrepreneurship imposed on them by the novel and unique design of a course that explicitly incorporates the team formation process into the curriculum. This is undertaken to gauge the extent to which students experience this shift as fitting the actual and perceived need for shared practices in developing enterprising behaviour, and to shed light on what action/process-based EEd courses may benefit from actively including a team formation process in the course design.

EEd may be offered for a number of reasons. New enterprises are seen as a potential source of economic wealth and for the student, this type of education offers the possibility of using their knowledge in new ways, becoming entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs. Also, from the perspective of both the higher education institution and the student, in the fast changing world in which we live, the digital mobility and multiplicity of work environments requires a workforce that possesses a range of individual competences. Such as being persistent, engaged and having good ideas, competences that are difficult to teach and hard to learn. Adding to our knowledge of how to handle these concerns, the paper points at a number of social implications of EEd.

The research conducted in this research paper contributes to the field of EEd by exemplifying how conceptual understandings of entrepreneurship as a collective enterprise, rather than an individual one, impact students’ understanding and experience of entrepreneurship. Furthermore, it provides a foundation for expanding research aimed at providing students with a learning experience more in line with the everyday life of an entrepreneur.

This study offers empirical evidence from a nationally representative panel dataset of nascent entrepreneurs (PSED-II) regarding when external financing is acquired and how certain factors affect this timing during the cumulative process of nascent entrepreneurs taking actions toward establishing an operational entity. By assessing the relationship between the external financing event and the cumulative set of actions that nascent entrepreneurs undertake to create new businesses, we improve our understanding of how the timing of acquiring external financing affects organizational survival and growth.

We apply nonparametric and semiparametric survival analysis techniques to a nationally representative panel dataset of nascent entrepreneurs. This ascertains the probability of an external financing event at any given moment in time and a set of startup conditions that we hypothesize will affect this timing. First, we use Kaplan–Meier analysis to explore when external financing occurs during new business creation. We then use discrete-time survival analysis to investigate whether certain startup conditions affect when external financing occurs. Finally, we conduct a test of independence to examine the external financing event relative to other startup activities completed during new business creation.

Nascent entrepreneurs tend to acquire external funding relatively late in the new venture startup process – on average, about two-thirds of the way from conceiving of the idea and becoming operational. They tend to take actions that are less resource-demanding early in the startup process to build their organizations to a fundable stage. Net worth tends to speed up the acquisition of external funding as wealthy entrepreneurs tend to ask for funding earlier in the process. Finally, entrepreneurs in capital-intensive industries do not seem to get outside funding before entrepreneurs in other industries.

This study is unique in three ways. First, we investigate the timing of the highly important external financing event. Timing is critical in unpacking and making sense of the very early stages of a new business and in guiding entrepreneurs and students about when to do what. Second, we do so in a subsample of preoperational, nascent, funded entrepreneurs derived from a nationally representative panel dataset of startup attempts. Third, our findings provide a counter-intuitive yet systematic understanding of organizational emergence and very early-stage financing.