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There is wide consensus on the importance of experiential entrepreneurship education. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether two unconventional experiential courses, with the style and content that the authors would like to have experienced before becoming entrepreneurs, can be successfully grafted on to the more conventional offerings of a large university business school.

The authors create learning by allowing a small group of students with serious business ideas to actually be entrepreneurs (rather than pretending to be) as they evaluate, optimize, and start running their businesses within the university course structure. All distractions from these goals, such as formal business plans and academic exercises, are removed, and direct contact with outside stakeholders is strongly emphasized. Fellow‐students and the instructor provide constant feedback and ideas to adapt and improve the businesses.

The courses meet a variety of accepted experiential education criteria, receive highly positive student evaluations, and generate many real businesses.

The methodology provides a practical, scalable, and effective way to provide university education through entrepreneurship.

The approach described in the paper has many unusual aspects and works very well. It may be of interest to others attempting innovations in the teaching of entrepreneurship and of the enterprising mindset.

This paper seeks to address an underdeveloped aspect of entrepreneurship education (EE), which is still criticised for not explicitly linking educational practice with established educational theory. As such, the purpose of this paper is to propose a novel educational framework – Authentic Alignment – that the authors evolved based on their own EE practice, as well as two major educational theories.

A review of a range of conceptual educational frameworks in EE revealed a gap in the current literature, referring to the fact that practice is not sufficiently linked to sound educational theory. The paper combines a range of educational theories – predominantly Constructive Alignment (CA) and Authenticity – to develop a novel conceptual framework, termed “Authentic Alignment”. The discussion of Authentic Alignment draws upon EE literature, as well as student feedback and the reflections and experiences of the practitioners and academics involved in delivering a higher education unit underpinned by Authentic Alignment.

It is argued that Authentic Alignment coherently and explicitly links educational practice to major established educational theories and as such presents a valuable approach to education through entrepreneurship as it aligns authentic approaches to instruction, learning and assessment that strike a balance between resembling and being relevant for real entrepreneurial activity.

The paper invites educators to draw upon Authentic Alignment for their own entrepreneurship units/programmes by customising the specific approaches to their own requirements, while retaining the underlying principle of constructively aligned authentic education.

By explicitly linking EE to CA and Authenticity, this paper introduces a novel educational framework that provides a valuable structure for education through entrepreneurship. The customisability of Authentic Alignment, however, suggests a wider applicability and is thus valuable also for education about and for entrepreneurship.