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The question arises whether entrepreneurship education will be able to facilitate the entrepreneurial attitude in the near future. Unfortunately, the decisive role of compulsory schooling has long been neglected in this context. Until recently it was considered sufficient to provide education in entrepreneurship in universities (especially in the area of Business Administration) or in the form of special courses for people who consider starting their own business. Picking up the discussion at this point, the purpose of this paper is to analyse to what extent compulsory school education in Germany and Sweden facilitates a more entrepreneurial way of thinking among pupils.

First, the paper briefly summarises the relevant research literature and specify important components of entrepreneurship education. Second, it discusses what exactly is to be understood by entrepreneurial qualities and present a holistic approach based on a model by Dahlgren. Third, it describes the unique data and presents some empirical results. The empirical analysis concentrates on Germany. Yet, for reasons of comparison, it additionally analyses the situation in Sweden. Finally, the paper summarises the results and discusses the policy implications.

The results presented clearly suggest that German schools do not succeed very well in presenting self‐employment as an attractive alternative to dependent work. Swedish pupils generally show a higher preference for self‐employment than their German counterparts. Furthermore, the results suggest that German schools diminish rather than encourage pupils' ambitions to become self‐employed as the pupils become older.

To the authors' knowledge this is the first empirical study which compares the effect of different school systems on entrepreneurial attitude simultaneously (i.e. with the same questionnaire and at the same point of time).

Firms increasingly integrate a wide range of actors in the early ideation and concept creation phases of innovation processes leading to the collection of a large number of ideas. This creates the challenge of filtering the most promising ideas from a large number of submissions. The use of external stakeholders into the evaluation and selection of submissions (i.e. open evaluation (OE)) might be a viable alternative. The purpose of this paper is to provide a state-of-the-art analysis on how such OE systems are designed and structured.

Since OE is a new phenomenon, an exploratory qualitative research approach is adopted. In all, 122 instances of OE in 90 innovation contest cases are examined for their design elements.

This research reveals that OE systems are configured in many different ways. In total, 32 design elements and their respective parameters are identified and described along the six socio-technical system components of an OE system. This study allows for a comprehensive understanding of what OE is and what factors need to be taken into consideration when designing an OE system.

Scholars and professionals may draw insights on what design choices to make when implementing OE.

The comprehensive analysis performed in this study contributes to research on open and user innovation by examining the concept of OE. In particular, it extends knowledge on design elements of OE systems.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate differences in how men and women small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) entrepreneurs make decisions regarding whether to invest in technologies for their firms. Answering recent calls for a gendered perspective in entrepreneurial decision-making, this study integrates premises from social identity theory and role congruity theory to help explain innovation investment decisions among male and female SME entrepreneurs.

Using data from 121 SME entrepreneurs in the dry cleaning industry, the authors employ a conjoint experimental methodology to capture decisions SME entrepreneurs make to adopt or reject an environment-friendly dry cleaning technology. The authors examine the role gender, firm revenue, technology price, and technology complexity play in entrepreneur investment decisions.

The authors find that gender indirectly impacts innovation purchase decisions through interactions with firm revenue and key innovation characteristics. Women SME entrepreneurs were less likely to purchase the technology than their male counterparts at low (and high) firm revenue, high innovation price, and high innovation complexity—all highly risky, masculine, choice contexts.

These findings suggest that men and women's entrepreneurial investment decisions might be shaped by gender stereotypes. Future research should sample additional industries and determine the norms guiding gendered decision-making.

Beyond the decision to launch a new venture, this multi-level analysis, using the lens of social identity and role congruity theories, helps illuminate how men and women SME entrepreneurs approach innovation investment decision-making in significantly different—and gender role consistent—ways.