Entrepreneurship education

Although entrepreneurship education has some roots in the 1970’s, until the early 1980’s few business schools were teaching entrepreneurship (Katz, 2003). In the 1990’s the field began to take off, as the “interest shifted from teaching small business management to the conceptualiza-tion and launch of scalable, high-potential ventures predicated on new technologies and innovative business ideas” (Kuratko & Morris, 2018, p. 12). Additionally, the need for a stronger entrepreneurial society has

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acker-softwar acker-softwar

been placed on the agenda of governments and business in the last decade and programs on how to learn for entrepreneurship in the sense of “entre-preneurship education” are now the bread and butter of leading universi-ties and business schools. However, even though entrepreneurial learning is the aim, or the core concept of entrepreneurship education, there is a paucity in research on what makes or breaks the success of certain pro-grams. Therefore, this section will shortly review recent developments within the field of entrepreneurship education that are relevant for the purpose of this study.

An early work has been contributed by Harrison & Leitch (1994), who recognize parallels between leadership studies and the development of entrepreneurship education and call for an increased attention to team-based approaches and changes in the nature and understanding of the business organization itself. However, the authors rather regard entrepre-neurship education as being part of management studies instead of a field in its own rights. Kuratko (2005) acknowledges the major developments in the last decade, however, draws attention that there still “remains the challenge of entrepreneurship’s complete academic legitimacy” (p. 579).

He proposes that advance will result from (1) an innovative atmosphere supporting society to grow and expand; (2) educators who can assist new ventures to develop and mature enterprises to maintain an entrepreneurial attitude; and (3) a climate to develop high achievers who will create fu-ture innovations.

Shepherd (2004) draws attention to the role of emotion in learning from failure and argues that entrepreneurship educators should take the topic in their pedagogies by adding a focus on how students “feel” rather than

“think”. In his paper, the author explores possible ways of educating

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dents on how to regulate their emotions as well as possible methods to measure the implications of the suggested changes. Additionally, Kuratko & Morris (2018) suggest that content of entrepreneurship educa-tion program should not be limited to business and entrepreneurship ba-sics, but also include the development of an entrepreneurial mindset, in-cluding subjects such as optimism, learning from failure, and resilience.

As it has been acknowledged by previous research, reflection plays an important role in entrepreneurial learning (Cope & Watts, 2000; Politis, 2005), hence Lundmark, Tayar, Qin, & Bilsland (2019) carried out re-search regarding links between reflection and entrepreneurial learning in a university setting. Their results show that reflection supports the devel-opment of entrepreneurial capabilities and that previous start-up experi-ence and reflection are positively related to perceived behavioural control.

Reflection is also one of the objectives of serious games applications in entrepreneurship education. Computer simulations that model entre-preneurship are on the rise, however, as the systematic literature review carried out by Fox, Pittaway, & Uzuegbunam (2018) reveals, in most of the games there is a major deficiency, as failure such as absolute and cata-strophic company losses were not allowed. Failure is a critical component of the entrepreneurial learning context (Cope, 2011), thus allowing play-ers to experience failure within safe environments, should be established as an important feature in entrepreneurship education.

The influence of entrepreneurial self-efficacy on entrepreneurial motiva-tion, intenmotiva-tion, behaviour and performance has been repeatedly stated in this review. In their systematic literature review on the concept, Newman et al. (2018) draw attention to the growing evidence that entrepreneurial education enhances self-efficacy and provides opportunities for mastery

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acker-softwar acker-softwar

experiences (i. e. through live case studies), vicarious learning (i. e.

through observation of role models), social persuasion (i. e. through men-toring), and judgments of one's own psychological state (i. e. through learning about the lifestyles and coping strategies of entrepreneurs). Also, Ahsan, Zheng, DeNoble, & Musteen (2018) state the positive effects of mentoring on transition from student to entrepreneur, as an effective men-toring relationship appears to enable these entrepreneurs to gain a level of self-efficacy. Gielnik, Uy, Funken, & Bischoff (2017) have put forward a theoretical model to explain short- and long-term effects of entrepreneur-ship training on entrepreneurial self-efficacy, passion, and business crea-tion. Findings from their empirical research suggest that entrepreneurial self-efficacy is important to maintain high passion after training, high passion again eventually leads to business creation after training. A sum-mary of research on entrepreneurship education relevant for the purpose of this dissertation can be found in table 6.

Table 6 Literature summary on dissertation-specific entrepreneurship ed-ucation research

Author / Research focus Key findings Harrison & Leitch (1994)

Conceptional paper

Reconceptualization of entrepreneurship education at the basis for a renewed and refocused approach to management education.

Katz (2003) Discussion paper

Proposal of 100+-item chronology of entrepreneur-ship education, major findings are that the field has reached maturity in the USA

Shepherd (2004) Conceptional paper

Recommendation of changes to pedagogy to include measures to emotion management and failure learn-ing.

Kuratko (2005) Discussion paper

Summary of trends and challenges of entrepreneur-ship education in the 21^st century.

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acker-softwar acker-softwar

Author / Research focus Key findings Gielnik et al. (2017)

Conceptional paper, empirical research

Development of theoretical model on entrepreneurial self-efficacy, passion, and business creation, field experiment over 32 months resulting in 784 observa-tions from 227 participants. Findings suggest a dy-namic nature of post-training processes and self-efficacy being important for high passion, leading eventually to business creation.

Ahsan et al. (2018) Conceptional paper, empirical research

Development of process model on the effects of men-tor relationship and student founders affective state on entrepreneurial identity and venture progress. Empiri-cal research by application of qualitative, multi-case study approach with 14 venture teams. Findings sug-gest improved transition to entrepreneurship due to effective mentoring and positive founder’s affect.

Fox et al. (2018) Review of the literature

Review of entrepreneurship education literature in regard to the role of simulations and nature of serious games, a review of 75 articles yielded eight games to be reviewed in detail, one of the findings highlights the neglect of failure as a major learning opportunity.

Kuratko & Morris (2018) Discussion paper

Examination of six major trajectories of research in regard to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education, namely (1) purpose of teaching; (2) con-tent of teaching; (3) delivery mechanism of teaching;

(4) structure of entrepreneurship programs; (5) teach-ing outcomes; and (6) program leadership.

Newman et al. (2018) Review of the literature

Systematic review of the literature entrepreneurial self-efficacy, 128 papers, research needs on factors which drive short-term fluctuations and long-term changes, developmental precursors in childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, possible negative effects, collective level of the phenomenon.

Lundmark et al. (2019) Empirical research

Empirical research on reflection and entrepreneurial learning on 125 students, results show that reflection supports development of entrepreneurial capabilities and that previous start-up experience and reflection have a positive impact on perceived behavioural control.

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acker-softwar acker-softwar

To summarize, entrepreneurial learning in both the entrepreneurial pro-cess as well as in the context of training and educating the next generation of entrepreneurs has developed as an area of increasing importance for entrepreneurship research. Although major concepts and frameworks have been introduced over the last decade, many questions still remain un-answered and new questions, such as the value of entrepreneurial behav-iour as a strategy for established midsized and large organizations to achieve a competitive advantage (Kuratko & Morris, 2018a) do arise con-stantly. In their research paper, the authors state “a lack of innovative (or entrepreneurial) actions in today’s global economy could be a recipe for failure” (p. 42), which brings us nicely to the next section of the literature review.