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The purpose of this paper is to study different aspects and tensional forces that play a role in the internal and contextual negotiation that takes place within students in the exploration of the possible identity of entrepreneur. It expands the knowledge of how the university context influences student entrepreneurial processes from a multiple identity perspective. The findings are related to discussions of entrepreneurship education.

A conceptual paper that presents a framework on student entrepreneurial identity sense making that is grounded in a multiple identity perspective. The framework is illustrated by ten narrative cases on student entrepreneurship.

The framework suggests four different ways students make sense of identity in the process of exploring the entrepreneurial identity along with their university studies. In this process students negotiate between the two identities of “student” and “entrepreneur”, both demanding in time, effort and commitment, and they in different manners struggle with balancing university belonging and entrepreneurial distinctiveness.

The framework serves as a point of departure for discussing the psychological processes and tensions associated with students’ entrepreneurial identity construction, and what it means to entrepreneurship education. It is suggested that universities to a higher degree have to view themselves as psychological institutional moratoriums and thus as platforms of identity explorations rather than deterministic systems preparing students for certain careers to support students in becoming entrepreneurs.

Despite the significance, university student start-ups and student entrepreneurship ecosystems (SEEs) have been subject to little research. This study aims to apply a qualitative emergent enquiry approach to explore best practice SEEs in Australia, complimented by narratives from leading scholars in higher education institutions with the aim of delineating the integrative components of SEEs.

Adopting the entrepreneurial ecosystem framework and aligned to the social cognitive theory, this paper explores the components and dynamics of SEEs, contributing to an understanding of how such components can better support the growth, sustainability and success of student start-ups. The authors extend entrepreneurship research on social construction using narrative research.

The findings provide guidelines for researchers, entrepreneurship scholars and educators, entrepreneurship students, policymakers and practitioners to enhance the impact and success of university student start-ups by adopting a student ecosystem approach.

The narratives represent a limited number of universities with an opportunity for further research to empirically measure the impact and outcomes of SEEs. The research is exploratory, inherently conceptual and emergent, providing an opportunity for validation of narrative frameworks in future studies.

The findings may assist university managers to be more aware of their own subconscious preferences to student entrepreneurship and start-up initiatives, which may be useful in refining their impact and offerings regarding a quest toward the entrepreneurial university.

From social perspectives, the alignment of the components of SEE has the ability to enhance and shift the entrepreneurial mindset of entrepreneurship students, notwithstanding enhancement of intentionality and self-efficacy.

This is the first study of SEEs in Australia, highlighting the importance of the integration of entrepreneurship education programs, entrepreneurship education ecosystems, the entrepreneurial university and specific start-up initiatives such as university accelerators. Furthermore, students may enhance their entrepreneurial mindset by actively engaging in such ecosystems.

While much research seeks to determine the impacts of entrepreneurship education on students, far less attention has been paid to students’ motivations and interests. Understanding students’ perspectives is useful, particularly as governments support the expansion of campus entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to develop a deeper understanding of students’ reasoning in relation to pursuing entrepreneurship education.

Specifically, the key questions driving this study were: Why do students join experiential learning entrepreneurship programs? How do they define their goals for entrepreneurship education, and what outcomes do they value? Data were collected through interviews with 38 students participating in a range of experiential entrepreneurship programs in Ontario.

Four different patterns in students’ reasoning and sense making emerged from the analysis. First, “venture creators” are the prototypical student entrepreneurs who are set on creating and launching a venture. Second, “experience seekers” aim at gaining practical work experience but do not see themselves as nor intend to become entrepreneurs. Third, “explorers” aim at developing familiarity with basic concepts and opportunities in entrepreneurship, as a means to consider whether this is an attractive career option. Finally, “engagers” are actively experimenting with entrepreneurship as they gauge their “fit” and potential as entrepreneurs.

This study’s findings provide an empirically grounded check on the assumptions guiding government policy for entrepreneurship education and institutional practice. Policy and institutional attention is overly focused on venture creation, even as other outcomes are commonly espoused. Recognizing different profiles of entrepreneurship students may lead to more purposefully designed programs that have different objectives, and help distinct segments of students achieve their goals.

The study aims to evaluate the components of entrepreneurship education and training (EET) in India. The paper proposes a framework for an effective EET regime for amalgamating entrepreneurship education as fundamental to mainstream higher education in India.

The current study utilises a qualitative research technique, that is, the narrative inquiry methodology based on in-depth interviews. The study respondents included sixteen educators who are actively engaged in EET and related activities for a minimum of ten years.

The study identified five broad “meaning units” or “themes,” that is, “incremental pedagogical efficiency and flexible evaluation systems,” “entrepreneurial experience of the faculty,” “extended support,” “holistic mentoring” and “experiential learning” as components of an effective EET regime.

The study will help the policymakers and higher education institutions (HEIs) revisit their policy frameworks and practices to promote entrepreneurial capacity and entrepreneurial intentions among students. The study will also help to gain deeper insights into EET components and will propose a framework for an effective EET regime based on its findings.

Theory of planned behavior (TPB) has been used to study the impact of entrepreneurial education (EE) on entrepreneurial intention (EI) for more than 20 years, yet an intensive literature review reveals that there are gaps in both the conceptual models and the research methods. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of EE on EI with a view to address the gaps in previous research.

This research proposes a conceptual model that links the entire antecedent variables of TPB and the elaborated four components of entrepreneurship education (Why, What, How, and Who). The model is tested by a structural equation modeling with the empirical data from 200 engineering students from three universities in Hong Kong.

The empirical test reveals that the four components of entrepreneurial education do influence attitude, social norm, self-efficacy, and EI, correspondingly. Additionally, it also reveals that the four EE components and the three TPB antecedent variables are also interrelated with each other.

This study bridges specific education components and EI, providing significant insight into how the key components influence the entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions of students. It fills the gap in the knowledge required for fostering EI through entrepreneurship education. It not only answers the question on whether EE influences EI but also on how to nurture the intention by designing a relevant EE course.

This study aims to explore expectation gaps concerning the roles between educators and students in the context of venture creation courses at higher education institutions by investigating their mutual perspectives. The authors seek to answer the following research questions: (1) how is the role expectation toward the entrepreneurship education of teachers different from that of students and (2) what are the consequences of these expectation gaps in entrepreneurship education?

This study applies an explorative qualitative approach. As the research setting, the authors selected an entrepreneurship education course for advanced management students at a German public university. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with both educators and students to examine how role ambiguity emerges in venture creation courses.

This study identified discrepancies between educators and students in their fundamental assumptions regarding the role of educators and students. Such discrepancies are the autonomy-level assumption gap, capacity assumption gap and learning outcomes expectation gap. Based on the findings, this study develops a framework of expectation gaps between educators and students as sources for role ambiguity in entrepreneurship education by extending the role episode model developed in role theory.

The findings contribute to the extant literature on entrepreneurship education in several ways. First, this study reveals that students in venture creation programs can encounter role ambiguity due to differing expectations about their role between educators and students, which can negatively affect the students' perception of their learning outcome. Second, this study discovered that the possible discrepancies regarding the fundamental assumptions about the role of educators and students pose a challenge to educators. Third, the findings illuminate the importance of understanding the complex identity of students in the context of student-centered entrepreneurship education.

This study offers several practical implications for entrepreneurship educators in higher education institutions. First, this study reveals the confusion among students concerning their role in entrepreneurship education. As such, it is recommended that educators explain to students the purpose of the student-centered pedagogical approach and the expected role of students in acting as independent entrepreneurial agents. Second, while student-centered entrepreneurship education is based on the fundamental assumption that students are motivated to develop their own startup projects, educators must consider the nature of students' motivation and their overall student-life situation. Finally, this study demonstrates the importance of creating an active feedback loop so that entrepreneurship teachers can be aware of such perceptional gaps between educators and students and understand the sources of these gaps.

While the extant literature indicates the existence of perceptual gaps between educators and students in the context of entrepreneurship education, how these gaps emerge and influence the outcome of entrepreneurship education remained unclear. One critical reason for the under-investigation of this issue was that existing studies predominantly emphasize the educators' perspectives, although such expectation gaps can only emerge through the discrepant views of two different parties. This study tackled this research gap by considering the mutual perspective of educators and students by applying role theory.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of an enterprise education (social innovation and enterprise) learning programme on the enterprising characteristics among interdisciplinary undergraduate enterprise education students from a general (without considering gender) and gender-specific perspective at a higher education institution in the United Arab Emirates.

Based on a convenience sampling approach, pre- and post-surveys were distributed among 180 undergraduate students from January to April 2019. An independent-samples t-test was utilised to evaluate the impact of enterprise education on students' learning for three sample classifications, which were (1) general or gender-neutral (no gender consideration), (2) male and (3) female.

This study found significant improvements in the enterprising characteristics of students as a result of undertaking the learning programme in enterprise education. There was a greater improvement among female students in comparison to male students. However, contrasts in enterprising enhancement trends between female and male students were recognised. While the greatest improvement for male students were identified in their risk-taking characteristics, for female students, the risk-taking characteristic evidenced the least influence. The differences between the enterprising levels in risk-taking, and locus of control, between male and female students, were prominent post completion of the learning programme.

Considering that a quantitative method of inquiry was adopted to address the dearth of research evaluating the effectiveness of our learning programmes in enterprise education (i.e. social innovation) on students' psychological traits through a gendered lens, qualitative insights could enrich the depth of the research findings. As this study was conducted on a limited number of students at a single university, the results do not claim generalisation to other contexts.

The outcomes of this research deliver valuable insights about the divergent influences of enterprise learning programmes on male and female students. The implications of the study suggest that policymakers and stakeholders should consider gender diversities when designing an effective and equitable entrepreneurship and enterprise learning programme that fosters and stimulates students' enterprising mindset and confidence for both male and female students. The implications are for academics, educational instructors and policymakers.

This study presents a literature review on the impact of entrepreneurship education by focusing on the key enterprising psychological characteristics and educational systems over the last two decades, and illustrates that most studies in the field of entrepreneurship are based on either general (gender-neutral) or gender-specified investigations. This work provides a comparison between these two perspectives in a relatively underexplored region of the UAE and demonstrates that relying solely on gender-neutral analyses hinders the opportunity to enhance and effectively harness females' entrepreneurial potential.

Entrepreneurship has become a widely accepted concept in the past few decades due to its prominent role in economic activity and economic development of a nation. Promotion of entrepreneurship can be ensured with the help of entrepreneurship teaching and learning through higher education institutions. Similarly, entrepreneurship skills play a significant role in the promotion of students’ intentions to become entrepreneurs. This study aims to examine the role of universities and entrepreneurship skills on the entrepreneurial intentions of students.

Business simulation games is taken as mediator between university role and entrepreneurial intentions as well as entrepreneurship skills and entrepreneurial intentions. This research has used Smart PLS to perform a PLS-SEM technique with a data of 378 students from higher education institutions of Malaysia.

The results of data analysis show a positive role of universities and entrepreneurship skills in the promotion of student’s entrepreneurial intentions. Moreover, business simulation games positively mediates the relationship between dependent and independent variables.

Results of this research prove that entrepreneurial skills and university support have a significant part in the promotion of entrepreneurship intentions of students. As students use the electronic resources such as business simulation games, their skills, attitude and practical knowledge is positively enhanced and eventually it positively impacts the intention of students to become entrepreneurs. Therefore, it is believed that promotion of entrepreneurial skills in students via business simulation games and positive role of universities in promoting entrepreneurship will have a significant positive influence on the students’ entrepreneurial intentions.

Student entrepreneurs account for a considerable number of start-up ventures derived from university settings. Nevertheless, there is little research that demonstrates how university entrepreneurship education (EE) directly influences students’ start-up activities. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of various types of university entrepreneurship activities (incorporate entrepreneurial courses, extra-curricular initiatives, and start-up support) on student start-up behavior. This quantitative research utilized questionnaire data collected from university students (n = 1,820) in southeast China and was analyzed with hierarchical Poisson regression in STATA procedures. Research results indicate that engaging in any type of university entrepreneurship activities positively predicts students’ start-up activities, yet this positive effect is contingent on students’ prior start-up experience and the overall university entrepreneurial climate. These findings advance our understanding of crucial elements within university entrepreneurial ecosystems and how various entrepreneurship activities within these ecosystems potentially impact students’ venture creation.

Doctoral students are promising entrepreneurial actors in university-based ventures, which positively impact the external environment and create value for their universities. In this article, the authors extend current research on academic entrepreneurship by shedding light on the role of university support in the early stage of Ph.D. entrepreneurship. Based on social information processing theory, the authors posit that academic entrepreneurship results from the interplay between doctoral students' human capital and university-level support. A multilevel model is proposed and empirically tested to shed light on the cradle of doctoral students' entrepreneurship by explaining the variance of their entrepreneurial alertness and intentions.

A model is proposed that explains the combined effect of specific human capital and different forms of university support on doctoral students' cognitive transition from entrepreneurial alertness to intentions. The model was then tested through structural equation modeling (SEM) and multigroup analysis (MGA) on a sample of 187 doctoral students enrolled in Italian universities.

The SEM results reveal that doctoral students' entrepreneurial alertness is influenced by perceived educational support and human capital. The MGA demonstrates that those who perceive a higher level of support for concept and business development from universities are more likely to convert their alertness into intentions than those who perceive lower support.

The present paper brings to the stage doctoral students as an extremely promising entrepreneurial target. In doing so, it extends academic entrepreneurship studies by detailing how and when the different forms of university support influence their entrepreneurial decisions, along with individual dimensions.