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Although the role of reflections in entrepreneurship education is undeniable, the research has focused mainly on their advantages and consequences for learning process, whereas their dynamics and interrelations with other mental processes remain unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to better understand how personality and intelligence constructs: cognition, conation, and affection evolve and change along the learning process during entrepreneurship education.

To better understand reflective processes in entrepreneurial learning this paper adopts the tripartite constructs of personality and intelligence. By employing longitudinal explorative research approach and self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm, the authors follow students’ reflections during their two-year learning processes. First, the authors try to identify how the interplay between the cognitive, conative, and affective aspects emerges in students’ reflections. Then, the authors investigate how this interplay evolves during the individual learning process and finally, by looking for similarities in these learning pathways, the authors aim to identify patterns of students’ reflective learning process.

All constructs are present during the learning process and all are prone to change. The individual constructs alone shed no light on the interplay between different constructs, but rather that the interplay between sub-constructs should be taken into consideration as well. This seems to be particularly true for cognition, as procedural and declarative knowledge have very different profiles. Procedural knowledge emerges together with emotions, motivation, and volition, whereas the profile of declarative knowledge is individual. The unique profile of declarative knowledge in students’ reflections is an important finding as declarative knowledge is regarded as the center of current pedagogic practices.

The study broadens the understanding of reflective practices in the entrepreneurial learning process and the interplay between affective, cognitive, and conative sub-constructs and reflective practices in entrepreneurship education. The findings clearly indicate the need for further research on the interplay between sub-constructs and students’ reflection profiles. The authors see the study as an attempt to apply an exploratory statistical method for the problem in question.

The results are able to advise pedagogy. Practical implications concern the need to develop reflective practises in entrepreneurial learning interventions to enhance all three meta-competencies, even though there are so far no irrefutable findings to indicate that some types of reflection may be better than others.

The results of the analysis indicate that it is possible to study the complex and dynamic interplay between sub-constructs of cognitive, conative and affective constructs. Moreover, the research succeeded in identifying both individual variations and general reflection patterns and changes in these during the learning process. This was possible by adopting a longitudinal explorative research approach with SOM analyses.

This conceptual chapter re-actualizes the Didaktik-inspired discussions in entrepreneurship education, initiated by Kyrö, Blenker et al., and Bechard and Toulouse over 15 years ago. Didaktik in the German educational tradition is a pedagogical sub-discipline which, unlike the Anglo-American understanding of “didactics” as teaching methods, focuses on the relations between the subject, teacher, and students, and considers questions regarding what to teach, how to teach, and why, as being interdependent. A review of literature on entrepreneurship education published in the last decades shows that research in the German Didaktik tradition is sparse, and that the awareness of the differences between Didaktik and “didactics” has been overlooked. This chapter has practical implications for entrepreneurship educators as it presents Didaktik as an approach which comprises planning, implementing, and evaluating teaching in a way that includes an awareness of the learners’ relationship to the subject without excluding the teacher’s key role in education. In a theoretical perspective, the chapter challenges the Anglo-American understanding of “didactics” and proposes Didaktik as an approach to developing entrepreneurship education research and practice to be scientifically based in two fields and encompass transformative learning and critical perspectives, rather than being driven by political agendas and focusing on results.

The purpose of this study is to participate in the current debate on developing the theoretical basis for the concept and process of benchmarking. The paper aims to explore the prospects for a new form of benchmarking – networking benchmarking – and adopts, as the scientific framework of the process, an action research approach that combines scientific method and practical developmental work.

In order to explore the possibilities of these new theoretical constructions, this study applies them in a Nordic project, in which the representatives of five Nordic countries studied together how to develop their national statistical procedures on woman entrepreneurship by benchmarking and developing best practices for use in the Nordic countries.

The results supported the idea that benchmarking is a special kind of action research. The results also indicated that the need for explicating and mutually sharing adopted theoretical frames turned out to be one of the key points in increasing the efficiency and innovativeness of the process. Consequently, networking benchmarking and the action research model indeed have potential both as a theoretical frame and a practical tool, thus encouraging their further development.

It should be noticed, however, that the present study is only a very minor effort and an example of the possibilities scientific knowledge can offer to the developments of benchmarking.

From the practical perspective as a whole, this study offers a large range of opportunities for Nordic co‐operation within the field of entrepreneurship data gathering.

Considering more specifically future research directions from this study, the results encourage studying both the networking benchmarking the action research approach in different contexts. On the other hand, the findings also give some ideas for further development of the action research model.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on a course in entrepreneurship education for students studying for a Masters in Educational Sciences at a Finnish university. The course was structured around the principles of constructive alignment and aimed to move beyond reflection on entrepreneurship towards action

The course was delivered in alignment with intended learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities, and assessment. Along with lectures, group work and peer-review activities, students prepared a career development plan as the course progressed, undertook a homework assignment, wrote a reflective journal, and sat the GET2 test twice.

Quantitative and qualitative analysis suggests that students developed more enterprising attitudes as result of participating in the course. This paper makes an argument in favour of entrepreneurship as a subject for all, a transformative experience capable of shaping the mindset in all who participate.

This paper shows how a course on entrepreneurial education based on a “through” approach can be taught at a tertiary level in places other than economics faculties or business schools. Most tertiary courses rely on “about” and “for” approaches to entrepreneurial education, are teacher-centred, and follow a behaviouristic or cognitive learning paradigm of knowledge transmission, as opposed to the student-centred constructivist approach deployed and described here.

This study participates in the debate on advancing theoretical developments in the field of benchmarking processes. It suggests that approaching benchmarking as a research method helps to explicate the basis of benchmarking processes and at the same time offers tools for scientific research in this field. Adopting an interpretative, comparative concept analysis the study approaches benchmarking as an action research. The results indicate that benchmarking might be regarded as a special kind of action research; however, in that case, more attention would need to be addressed to the preliminary planning, observation, reflection and the use of theoretical frames, all of which are essential for distinguishing a scientifically‐conducted action research process from practical work. Thus, adopting an action research approach might improve the implementation as well as the theoretical foundation of the benchmarking process.

This study suggests that the most recent developments in the content, forms and targets of benchmarking represent a challenge to revise its concept and classification for both theoretical and practical purposes. This problem is approached through the interpretative, heuristic‐descriptive concept method that aims to understand the concepts and their definitions in order to re‐interpret the entity of the meanings. The first phase of the study applies the idea of the evolving concept, originally introduced by Watson and further modified by Ahmed and Rafiq. Its five generations are supplemented with two newcomers – competence, and as an option, network benchmarking. In the second phase these generations are then categorised by further developing Bhutta and Huq's two‐dimensional matrix. This provides a three‐dimensional profiling tool that could be used in analysing and conducting benchmarking processes. It covers the newest forms of benchmarking and is suitable for different targets. It also leads to a definition depicting the current outlook on benchmarking. The findings indicate that the evolving nature of the concepts and forms encourages us to revise our understanding of the theoretical bases of benchmarking. The results also indicate that benchmarking has potentials in many directions, encouraging both theoretical and empirical studies as well as their interaction.

The purpose of this paper is to justify, elaborate and elucidate the concepts of action, experience and reflection, and how they are intertwined when discussing contemporary entrepreneurship education. These concepts have been given a meaning in entrepreneurship education, but have not been discussed in-depth, and by that have been abridged in meaning and purpose, and mostly been treated in isolation from each other.

The paper is conceptual and takes its starting point in the historical development of the field and discusses the concepts, from philosophical roots and their application, in entrepreneurship education.

Neither of the discussed concepts are enough to generate learning one by one, as they are intertwined within the learning process that aims to generate knowledge. From this perspective, an understanding of how these concepts work, both individually and in synergy, is of importance for entrepreneurship education.

The discussion presented in this paper may be a starting point for future empirical studies on entrepreneurial learning, by developing the meaning of action, reflections and experience, or by trying to conceptualize them.

The study indicates that entrepreneurship education should not concentrate only on one dimension of the entrepreneurial learning process, as for example, on actions, but should try to combine all of its discussed elements.

By exploring the origins and developments around the concepts, the paper brings a deepened understanding of what the field considers as important when learning entrepreneurship. By decomposing and mutually referring the concepts, the authors contribute to the call of strengthening the theoretical and philosophical understanding in entrepreneurship education.