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In response to the emergence of an enterprise economy, government claims that building an enterprise culture is vital. Correspondingly, provision of entrepreneurship education in higher education has expanded. The paper aims to assess the potential of entrepreneurship education to develop skills, and of whether students perceive them as having value within the modern economy.

The paper draws from a longitudinal, collaborative study of students of entrepreneurship in four universities. Using a questionnaire‐based methodology, the paper is based on responses from a sample of 519 students.

Results include that any increase in graduate entrepreneurship is most likely to be a long‐term. Results also suggest that many students expect to work in new and small firms, and that skills developed by entrepreneurship education are applicable to both waged employment and entrepreneurship. Accordingly, entrepreneurship education seems to have much potential to develop skills appropriate for the enterprise economy.

The research is limited by its quantitative nature. As the primary purpose is to evaluate attitudes to entrepreneurship and perceptions of the economic environment, further research should involve qualitative follow‐up, in the form of focus groups and/or longitudinal case studies.

The value of the paper lies in the suggestion that investment in entrepreneurship education is likely to have a positive impact within the economy. The long‐term impact of an increase in awareness of entrepreneurship; of the ability to start firms; and an increase in skills transferable to waged employment within an enterprise‐based economy, can not be underestimated.

This study aims at measuring the results of the use of an improved and innovative teaching method, specifically designed for supporting the development of students’ entrepreneurship competence, through students’ self-assessment before and after the teaching.

The teaching methods design was based on the effectuation approach and considering the comprehensive entrepreneurship competence model as theoretical grounding. The teaching methods experimentation took place in three countries (Estonia, Italy and Poland), collecting pre–post self-assessment surveys from 404 students of entrepreneurship courses. The results of the experimental groups were compared, in each country, with those of control groups not exposed to the same teaching.

Students participating in classes using innovative teaching methods declared an increase in entrepreneurship competencies, with statistically significant differences, contrasting the results in the control group. The positive changes in self-assessment were observed for 13 of 14 subcompetencies investigated. The increase in the level of the self-assessment of entrepreneurship subcompetencies was significantly greater among bachelor’s degree students.

The strengths of the study include a diverse research sample and a uniform structure of teaching design applied in three different countries, while specific comparative studies on entrepreneurship education and its effect on learners are limited. Moreover, this study used a pre–post design and involved a control group, while most of the existing research on the effect of entrepreneurship teaching are based on different methods. Finally, while most studies measure the impact of entrepreneurship education by focusing on entrepreneurial intentions, this study focused on the development of students’ entrepreneurship competences.

The role of entrepreneurship education in promoting entrepreneurial actions remains unclear. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the logic of different types of entrepreneurship education and the effect of learning characteristics in promoting entrepreneurial actions among student entrepreneurs in the higher education setting.

The study employs a quantitative approach involving the use of survey data collected via an Internet tool. The constructs of variables are measured using previously tested scales. The data were analysed using partial least squares modelling because it can handle formative and reflective constructs in the same model and is capable of testing for moderation.

The findings illustrate that voluntary entrepreneurship education generates learning outcomes in terms of students' entrepreneurial actions, which is important because without action, a venture will never be launched. This is especially so if students show a deep learning orientation, while mastery motivation showed a significant and negative moderating effect. This is not the case for compulsory entrepreneurship education.

Embedded in construal level theory, this paper offers knowledge that can help to advance entrepreneurship education research (1) by uncovering the role of different types of entrepreneurship education interventions, (2) by considering students' entrepreneurial actions as the dependent variable and (3) by unravelling the role of students' learning characteristics in the efficacy of entrepreneurship education interventions. By doing this, the study addresses recent repeated calls for more fine-grained research focused on how university students learn in entrepreneurship in higher education and its effects.

Entrepreneurial knowledge occupies a significant place in policy discourse and practice, especially in developed economies. This study aims to examine the effect of entrepreneurial knowledge on the components of entrepreneurial intent of undergraduate students. The authors seek to decipher a deeper understanding of their orientation for engaging in new ventures. In addition, we analyze the mediating role of behavioral antecedents between entrepreneurial knowledge and entrepreneurial intent.

The authors collected the primary data of 400 undergraduate students from French universities and used structural equation modeling through Smart PLS software for testing several pertinent hypotheses.

The study’s results revealed that entrepreneurial knowledge negatively affects students’ attitudes in choosing entrepreneurship in favor of a corporate job. In addition, entrepreneurial knowledge does not affect the social norms and self-efficacy that shape entrepreneurial intent. Interestingly, our study also revealed no mediating role between entrepreneurial knowledge and students’ self-efficacy.

The findings of this study will contribute to the academic discourse on the role of entrepreneurial knowledge and its potential effect in promoting entrepreneurship. Furthermore, this study has policy implications and solicits developing entrepreneurship programs to enhance entrepreneurial intent among young people.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of undergraduates' specialised entrepreneurship programmes in Malaysian universities that have been made available to “ME generation” students. By analysing the antecedents and predicting self‐employment intention, the paper evaluates the impact of such programmes upon the employability value of undergraduates who are part of the ME generation in a developing country such as Malaysia.

A census survey was conducted on final and penultimate year students from major public and private universities in Malaysia. From these data, analyses of variables that affect self‐employment intention were performed, and the prediction of self‐employment intention was obtained.

The results show that the students do not perceive self‐realisation as their most salient beliefs and perceived that their entrepreneurship lecturers' expectations towards them to become self‐employed are not highly influential and need to be complied with. However, they believed that specialised entrepreneurship education (SEE) contributes to increasing entrepreneurial self‐efficacy and subsequently towards their self‐employment intention, and thus increases their employability value.

This research only studies students' self‐employment intention in their respective universities and not their actual behaviour. Results from the paper are limited in ability to demonstrate “actual” outcomes that result from the interaction of the antecedents in universities' confinement.

The paper provides an important analysis of the current status of entrepreneurship students in Malaysian universities. The findings provide insight on the development of effective entrepreneurship programme deliveries and methodologies.

The paper provides a basis to improve the effectiveness of SEE in Malaysian universities and in turn produce highly employable graduates.

Despite the increasing popularity of entrepreneurship among students in colleges and university, there is a surprising scarcity of theoretical or empirical research on this topic. In this article, we define the concept of student entrepreneurship, delineate its domain, and demarcate its boundaries. We propose a preliminary typology of student entrepreneurship rooted in the works of three leading economists from the Austrian School of Economics: Joseph Schumpeter, Israel Kirzner, and Ludwig Lachmann. We also identify and discuss important challenges associated with the practice of student entrepreneurship. The article concludes by advancing a future research agenda for the study of student entrepreneurship.

The primary purpose of this research is to explore how the cultural context, in this case, China, influences the teaching of entrepreneurship that seeks to cultivate student entrepreneurs during their university experience.

A qualitative case study approach is adopted to explore how the cultural environment affects the delivery and application of entrepreneurship education to university students in a Chinese context. Seventeen student entrepreneurs and three lecturing staff members in three Chinese universities were interviewed using a semi-structured interview approach.

The findings suggest that while Chinese universities have been importing teaching models and methods of entrepreneurship education from the United States and other countries, both students and educators are starting to recognise the need for teaching methods to be contextualised and designed based on national conditions and cultural characteristics. Findings from this study highlight cultural fusion and collision in the process of importing and implementing entrepreneurial teaching methods. For example, teaching students how to write a business plan appears to offer limited value for students' start-up activities and their venture development. The didactic teaching method centred on teachers without entrepreneurial experience works for the teaching “about” entrepreneurship but is paradoxical to the goal of teaching “for” entrepreneurship.

Little theoretical or empirical attention has been paid to the complexity of the cultural environment of teaching approaches to entrepreneurship education. This paper provides novel empirical insight into why the cultural environment plays a critical role in teaching approaches to entrepreneurship education and how these teaching approaches can be culturally nuanced to better meet the needs of nascent student entrepreneurs in various cultural contexts.

The purpose of the paper is to provide insight into how students navigate entrepreneurial ecosystems and make use of social networks as they create their own ventures. Such ecosystems for students are an understudied phenomenon and there is a need for more profound insights into the issue in order to build better support systems for student entrepreneurs. The study aims to increase understanding on the elements that are important in students' entrepreneurial ecosystems and how these impact on students' venture creation processes, with emphasize on the role social networks play. Student entrepreneurs account for a substantial number of the startups that come into being at universities. Understanding more about how the surroundings affects this process is important for facilitating student entrepreneurship in higher education.

The study is qualitative and makes use of in-depth interviews with student entrepreneurs, educators and support actors in the ecosystems. Multiple actors were interviewed in order to capture different perspectives on the matter, with a total of 15 interviews conducted.

Two main findings arose from the study. First, it provides insight into elements that are perceived as important for student venture creation by the student entrepreneurs themselves, by educators and by support actors in the ecosystems. Second, it describes how the elements make up the entrepreneurial ecosystems surrounding the students, which serve as platforms from which students can develop their social networks. Therefore, the study highlights how such ecosystems can serve as sources from which students can gain access to ideas, resources and identity processes.

A limitation of the study is that the interviews took place in one country. Consequently, further investigation is necessary to establish whether the findings are valid in other contexts. The research has implications for higher educational institutions, policymakers and researchers concerned with student entrepreneurship and student venture creation.

The study contributes empirical findings on a topic that is currently not well understood and on which there are few empirical studies. While student ventures represent a substantial proportion of university spin-offs, the topic has received little attention compared to research on academic entrepreneurship. The study represents a step towards enhancing understanding of students' entrepreneurial ecosystems and how students gain access to resources through social network ties within these systems.

This study aims to explore the intention–behavior gap of student entrepreneurs who develop entrepreneurial intention in a venture creation course and decide to continue working on the business idea after completing the course. While many students decide to work on business concepts, they often struggle with taking further steps when the course ends. This suggests that the development of entrepreneurial intention in the course does not directly lead to entrepreneurial actions after the course. Hence, this paper examines the sources for the intention–action gap and behavioral responses of student entrepreneurs.

This study applied a systematic inductive qualitative research method to examine how student entrepreneurs encounter challenges after the entrepreneurship program and how they respond to them. The authors selected a venture development course at a German public university as their research context.

The findings revealed that students encountered substantial challenges after the program, which invoked their procrastinating behaviors. Based on the findings, this study developed a process model of the intention–behavior gap in student entrepreneurship. The process model provides a roadmap to follow the main findings, which consist of three main parts: (1) the antecedents of the intention–behavior gap; (2) behavioral responses of student entrepreneurs and (3) the outcomes of procrastination.

This study contributes to the emerging student entrepreneurship literature by identifying obstacles for students who intend to continue developing a venture after attending venture creation courses, as well as elaborating on possible student responses to these barriers and their subsequent impact on their nascent ventures. Furthermore, the findings contribute to developing the understanding of the intention–behavior gap in entrepreneurship education at higher education institutions by highlighting challenges for students that emerge in the transition phase from course participants to autonomous entrepreneurial actors.

Scholars have generally emphasized the vital role of entrepreneurship education in developing the entrepreneurial intentions of students as prospective entrepreneurs. However, researchers have only rarely examined how these intentions are translated into actions. Furthermore, the existing research on students' intention–behavior gap is limited to quantitative studies that demonstrate the existence of the gap empirically or apply theoretically derived moderators to their analysis. Consequently, the literature calls for more qualitative, explorative research approaches to understand what happens to students' entrepreneurial intentions once their entrepreneurship program is over.

There is a long-standing debate on whether the entrepreneurship education program (EEP) of university graduates can promote entrepreneurship intention and behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to use the theory of planned behaviour as a conceptual framework and compare the differences in entrepreneurial attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and intentions among students who participated in entrepreneurship education with a control group of Master of Business Administration (MBA) students in Pakistan. The study further examines what drives intentions between the two groups.

Data were collected using a questionnaire survey from 348 entrepreneurship students and 329 MBAs in their final year (both groups did a total of four years’ tertiary study). One-way analysis of variance test and regression analysis were used to examine the differences and the antecedents of entrepreneurship intention between the two groups.

MBAs have higher entrepreneurial intentions (EIs) than EEP students and the EIs are statistically significant. Nevertheless, the authors did not find any differences in attitude, perceived control behaviour and subjective norms towards entrepreneurship in both the groups. The entrepreneurship intentions of the MBA students are more influenced by social pressure as opposed to EEP students who are influenced by perceived control behaviours.

First, although the study introduced a control group, comparisons were based only on EIs and their antecedents in participants’ final year of study. This cross-sectional design provides no information about how much intentions and antecedents changed over time. A longitudinal study would provide information about such changes. Second, the groups in the study were matched in terms of gender, age distribution, family background, years of study and presumed disposition towards running their business. It would be useful if future comparative and longitudinal research measured these individual factors and their effects.

Educational activities render the starting of a business desirable and feasible by changing the attitudes and intentions. Nevertheless, various exposures to the challenges of being an entrepreneur via the education programmes may lower their intention to be entrepreneurs. As such, entrepreneurial programmes should be designed with care.

The study provides some insights on improving EIs especially in understanding the antecedents that are important for nations, such as Pakistan which has high unemployment and widespread poverty.

This study provides fresh evidence on the role of entrepreneurship education by comparing EIs and the cognitive antecedents of intentions of the two groups – entrepreneurship as well as MBA students.