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This paper investigates how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship and academia in an entrepreneurship training programme.

By employing a sensemaking approach, the paper inductively analyses materials from a business idea development camp organised for academic teachers.

In collective sensemaking during the camp, non-academic facilitators strongly influenced the reflection-in-experience via normative ideas of entrepreneurship and their othering of entrepreneurship from academic work. In their post-camp individual essays, the academic teachers reflect-on-experience and draw parallels between entrepreneurship and academic work constructing sameness.

Longitudinal research is needed in identity work and sensemaking among academic teachers in relation to entrepreneurship.

Universities need to offer arenas for teachers and other faculty to support identity work and sensemaking.

This study generates new understanding of how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship in training when interacting with others. It underscores the importance of time needed for reflection-on-action.

The purpose of this paper is to examine to what extent Finnish university students endorse entrepreneurial intent and the ways in which they position themselves in relation to entrepreneurship according to their self-perceived abilities or “ability self”.

The study was conducted by means of an e-survey, and the participants comprised the sample of students (n =1,819) from two Finnish universities, representing diverse fields of study.

It was found that a great majority of the students showed a relatively low intent to become an entrepreneur. The perception of abilities, such as innovativeness and ambitiousness-competitiveness, was positively related with entrepreneurial intent, whereas the perception of academic abilities and “conventional” employee skills indicated inverse associations.

The findings suggest that in terms of self-perceived abilities, entrepreneurship in an academic context is perceived as a rather restricted category to which only a few specific individuals have access. Accordingly, there is a certain tension between the tenets of entrepreneurship and corresponding abilities, and the ethos of universities and related high-valued abilities such as theoreticality and criticality.

Although employability and entrepreneur intent have been widely studied, little is known about students’ identification with entrepreneurship according to their ability perceptions. The present study contributes to the existing body of knowledge on university students’ “internal employability” that involves students’ self-assurance and views of work-related relevance with regard to supposed abilities.

The purpose of this paper is to critically investigate how collective identity is constructed and regulated by board members and other active members of student entrepreneurship societies (ESs).

A discursive analysis focusing on collective identity construction and regulation based on focus group discussions in two student-led Finnish ESs affiliated with higher education institutions (HEIs).

ES members construct and regulate collective entrepreneurial identity based on a shared narrative of entrepreneurship and the affective state of positive energy and thinking, i.e. “positive buzz.” Being entrepreneurial was constructed as having the right kind of mentality to cope with uncertain and rapidly changing working life and to break free of old moulds of working. The shared narrative was coherent, and critical reflection on the values or risks of entrepreneurship was mainly silenced.

As ESs are a relatively new phenomenon future research could explore ESs in different cultural and regional contexts and compare the identity construction and regulation of ES student members and non-members.

Strong collective identity and sense of commitment to doing things together may mitigate the pressures of being entrepreneurial and taking charge of one’s life.

Educational practice and research could benefit from better understanding of the informal context in which entrepreneurship education takes place.

The paper contributes to the relatively new research stream on ESs as student-led entrepreneurial organizations in HEIs. The research demonstrates how ES members participate in constructing a collective and coherent identity that is regulated by shared values and a positive state of mind. This study extends the understanding of ESs from the functional perspective to viewing them as a social community. It contributes to the definition of ESs and the self-understanding of ES actors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the identity work of postgraduate students participating in an entrepreneurship training programme for life sciences. The paper aims to analyse what kind of entrepreneurial identities are constructed and in what ways in the context of the programme.

The paper relies on learning diaries and other written materials harvested from seven participants. Drawing on a social constructivist analysis, the materials were analysed by drawing attention to the kind of identities created, the contradictions that surfaced and how those were resolved in the written materials.

Two distinct entrepreneurial identities were constructed by the participants: the heroic and the humane. The first is the stereotypical role prototype that the participants experiment with. For the male participants this seems acceptable and normal. If they were in possession of more information, knowledge and skills they could identify with this heroic entrepreneurial identity. However, the female participants constructed an alternative identity; the humane entrepreneur running a low-tech firm with modest business goals or acting as an intrapreneur in an existing organisation.

Future research should consider entrepreneurship programmes as arenas for (gendered) identity work.

Entrepreneurship training should not only provide the participants with business knowledge and skills but facilitate their entrepreneurial identity work.

The paper contributes to understanding entrepreneurship education as a context for entrepreneurial identity construction and extends the understanding of the expected outcomes of entrepreneurship education programmes. The study demonstrates how entrepreneurial identity construction processes in the context of entrepreneurship training are gendered.

The purpose of this article is to present a framework for research on gender and innovation. The framework is developed based on a review of the current literature in the area; it is applied to provide a context for the articles in this special issue and to offer suggestions for future research.

The article relies on a literature review of gender and innovation. Additional literature searches on Scopus were conducted to provide an overview of the area. In addition, comparative analogies are sought from research fields of gender and entrepreneurship as well as gender and technology.

The article presents the scope and issues in the current research on gender and innovation. Based on the overview, research in this area is conducted in various disciplines applying a variety of methodological approaches. In order to make sense of the current research, the paper developed a framework consisting of various approaches to, gender and innovation; these include gender as a variable, construction and process and innovation as a result, process and discourse.

Based on the review, several recommendations for future research are made. First, future research should question the connection between technology and innovation and purposefully seek innovation activity also in low-tech and service sectors and firms. Innovation scholars and policy makers should not primarily target radical and product innovations but should be equally interested in incremental and process innovations. Second, understanding women's innovation activity needs to be embedded in understanding the normative frames and structural factors at play. A particular theoretical call is linked to the study of power and innovation. Third, it is imperative to develop and apply new methodological approaches and new operationalizations of innovation and innovators.

By focusing on gender and innovation, it is possible to discover innovation as a gender biased phenomenon. Policy makers should bear this in mind when developing innovation policies.

An understanding of innovation literature and innovation policy as gender biased has important social implications. Discovering gendered structures is important to further develop gender equal societies. Further, innovation may be hampered by biases in the understanding of the concept, including gender biases.

This introductory article puts forward a framework on gender and innovation that helps to make sense of the current state-of-the-art and to develop new research questions that need to be addressed for further theorising within the field.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how the transition into entrepreneurship is constructed in the context of the boundaryless career. The paper focuses on a particular type of career transition driven by dismissal or unemployment.

The research material is collected in life‐story interviews with three Finnish female owner‐managers. In the study, a narrative analysis of the career move into entrepreneurship is conducted.

The results demonstrate how the concept of the boundaryless career and career discourse as such, and the personal career history and the larger employment setting in particular, are applied in making sense of the transition into entrepreneurship. The significance of dismissal or unemployment is not uniform, but is dependent on the participant's interpretation of the boundaryless career and work‐based security. Entrepreneurship is constructed both as a gender‐neutral and gendered process.

The career perspective could be more widely applicable to research into entrepreneurship, and perceiving entrepreneurship as work could offer an interesting avenue for future interdisciplinary study within career research.

By portraying the transition from unemployment/redundancy into entrepreneurship as a normal career shift, entrepreneurship is potentially made accessible to a broader group of people including unemployed women. Narratives have potential to be applied as career management tools.

The paper provides a contextualised view of the transition into entrepreneurship after unemployment and demonstrates how the entrepreneurship process is connected to the individual work history, employment setting, and gender.

This paper aims to address the impact of a person's motivation to study entrepreneurship on their subsequent levels of performance in terms of the generation of business ideas, while taking into account the effect of student team behaviour.

The paper hypothesises that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as well as team behaviour influence the learning outcome and that team behaviour moderates the relationship between motivation and learning outcomes. A survey was used to generate data. A total of 117 students, who participated in pre‐programme, and post‐programme surveys, provided the sample data. First, explorative factor analyses were employed to examine the latent variables. Second, hierarchical lineal regression analyses were carried out to test the proposed hypotheses.

It was found that intrinsic motivation has a negative effect on the learning outcome while extrinsic motivation had a positive one. However, the team (and in particular the resources that become available) positively moderates the relationship between the intrinsic motivation and the outcomes.

The paper contributes to the evaluation and research practices of different entrepreneurship education initiatives. The data are derived solely from business students, a factor that may cause bias in the results. In addition, the paper relied on self‐assessed perceptions of learning outcomes, since the stakeholder evaluations were team‐level measurements.

Students on entrepreneurship education programmes have different forms of motivation for studying entrepreneurship, and those tend to affect their satisfaction with the outcome of their studies. Using teams on an entrepreneurship course seems to generate more positive outcomes for students with both low and high intrinsic motivation, but particularly among the latter group. Ultimately, the results suggest the need for greater flexibility in course design.

The paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of how entrepreneurial learning outcomes are affected by student motivation and team behaviour. It makes an original contribution in distinguishing between an extrinsic and an intrinsic motivation to study entrepreneurship, and highlights the effect on learning outcomes of resources acquired through team behaviour. It also illustrates an opportunity to study the impact of entrepreneurship education, particularly when the creation of a new venture is not an immediate objective of the course.