Entrepreneurship Education: Challenged and Challenging

Dear Colleagues,

During the last twenty years, entrepreneurship education courses and policies have appeared all over the world (Solomon, 2007). The body of literature has expanded (e.g. Kakouris and Georgiadis, 2016; Nabi et al., 2017) revealing a vibrant research community (Landström et al., 2022). Though this expansion, it is becoming clear that entrepreneurship education challenges educational systems, educational agencies and educational customs, whilst at the same time, it is challenged by emerging topics, trends and perspectives (e.g. Jones et al., 2021).

The impetus for this special issue is to address current concerns about entrepreneurship education from different but complementary viewpoints.

Educational authorities envisage reforms based on entrepreneurship. For instance, the European Commission considers entrepreneurship a competence (Bacigalupo et al., 2016) calling for competence-based teaching practice; the UK’s QAA (2018) calls for horizontal integration of experience-based enterprise education across the university curricula; China released the “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” policy in 2014 (e.g. Reshetnikova, 2018); and India included entrepreneurship in its recent National Education Policy (NEP, 2020). Concurrently, educational policies embrace the ethical part of business venturing and its connection with employability and social cohesion. Social awareness emerges, especially in connection with the UN SDGs or the recent EU’s GreenComp (Bianchi, Pisiotis and Cabrera Giraldez, 2022), discriminating sustainability education from general entrepreneurship education. As a result, new trends and challenges in entrepreneurship education emerge worldwide.

Dedicated curriculum-based venture creation programmes are niche and rare and may challenge senior managers’ assumptions of successful academic practice (Smith, Draycott-Rogers, and Bozward, 2022). Academic constraints regarding the implementation of entrepreneurship education (Johannisson, 2016) with an underlying academic “illegitimacy” of its content and methods (Fayolle, 2013) have led to a wide part of entrepreneurial learning into informal settings (e.g. Preedy et al., 2020). Whilst this may be an effective avenue for the needs of promoting the entrepreneurial mindset, it questions the role of entrepreneurship, as articulated in formal education policies, along with its perceived inclusivity.

It has been well-documented that the progress of entrepreneurship education in primary and secondary schools (European Commission, 2016) does not meet the expectations of the policies. An emerging question pertains to theoretical and methodological gaps, or shortcomings, capable of explaining the nonuniform expansion of entrepreneurship education in all educational settings (e.g. Kakouris and Liargovas, 2021). What is the students’ entrepreneurial intention achieved by the current practice in formal settings and how this type of education is monitored and assessed?

In more recent years, especially in non-formal settings and under a wider perspective of entrepreneurship as design and science of the artificial (Venkataraman et al., 2012), entrepreneurial methods have dominated practice-based teaching (e.g. effectuation, lean start up, use of the Business Model Canvas, design thinking, and others, e.g. Mansoori and Lackeus, 2020).  Alongside andragogy, heutagogy and academagogy are proposed as teaching approaches (e.g. Hägg and Kurczewska, 2019; Jones, Penaluna and Penaluna, 2019; Neck and Corbett, 2018). Do these methods infuse a greater entrepreneurial intention to students compared with other teachings? How do teachers and educators familiarise themselves with and use them? Do these techniques fulfil the expectations of educational policies for innovative teaching in the field?

Recently, there have been calls to extend both research modalities and rigour (Nabi et al, 2017; Jones, Brentnall and McGowan, 2022), and teaching approaches and material such as using fiction and imagination (Gartner, Nordqvist, Schultz and Suddaby, 2021) to obtain more innovation and inclusiveness in entrepreneurship education. Contextual adjustments are proposed (e.g. Thomassen et al., 2019) as more efficient approaches to entrepreneurial teaching. In this vain, innovative teaching and alternative approaches in entrepreneurship education are sought.

Indicative, but not exhaustive, research questions for the special issue follow:

• What are the new and novel trends and challenges for entrepreneurship education in the 21st century?
• How does formal and non-formal entrepreneurship education coexist and complement each other?
• What are the current needs (e.g. theoretical, methodological) for further development of inclusive, formal entrepreneurship education?
• What is the impact attained by the current practice of formal entrepreneurship education?
• What are new ways to enrich innovative teaching in entrepreneurship and assess its impact?
• How do contexts of different kinds affect entrepreneurial teaching in schools, colleges, or Universities?
• What are the needs of students or entrepreneurship educators in a rapidly changing world?

References:

Bacigalupo, M., Kampylis, P., Punie, Y., & Van den Brande, G. (2016). EntreComp: The entrepreneurship competence framework. Luxembourg.

Publication Office of the European Union. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/38632642.pdf.

Bianchi, G., Pisiotis, U., & Cabrera Giraldez, M., (2022). GreenComp The European sustainability competence framework. In Y. Punie, M. Bacigalupo (Eds.), EUR 30955 EN, ISBN 978-92-76-46485-3, doi:10.2760/13286, https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC128040.

European Commission (2016). Entrepreneurship education at school in Europe. Eurydice report. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/74a7d356-dc53-11e5-8fea-01aa75ed71a1.

Fayolle, A. (2013). Personal Views on the Future of Entrepreneurship Education. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 25(7–8), 692-701.

Gartner, W. B., Nordqvist, M., Schultz, J. L., & Suddaby, R. (Eds.) (2021). Call for papers - Fiction and the Entrepreneurial Imagination. https://ju.se/center/cefeo/research/output/call-for-papers/cfp/2022-03-02-fiction-and-the-entrepreneurial-imagination.html.

Hägg, G., & Kurczewska, A. (2019). Who is the student entrepreneur? Understanding the emergent adult through the pedagogy and andragogy interplay. Journal of Small Business Management, 57(1), 130-147.

Johannisson, B. (2016). Limits to and prospects of entrepreneurship education in the academic context. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 28(5/6), 403-423.

Jones, C., Penaluna, K., & Penaluna, A. (2019). The promise of andragogy, heutagogy and academagogy to enterprise and entrepreneurship education pedagogy. Education + Training, 61(9), 1170-1186.

Jones, P., Apostolopoulos, N., Kakouris, A., Moon, C., Ratten, V., & Walmsley, A. (2021). Universities and Entrepreneurship: Meeting the Educational and Social Challenges. Emerald Publishing Limited.

Jones, P., Brentnall, C. & McGowan, P. (Eds.) (2022). Call for Chapters - Nurturing Modalities of Inquiry in Entrepreneurship Research. https://isbe.org.uk/emerald_isbe_nurturing_modalities/.

Kakouris, A., & Georgiadis, P. (2016). Analysing entrepreneurship education: a bibliometric survey pattern. Journal of Global Entrepreneurship Research, 6(1), 1-18.

Kakouris, A., & Liargovas, P. (2021). On the about/for/through framework of entrepreneurship education: a critical analysis. Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy, 4(3), 396-421.

Landström, H., Gabrielsson, J., Politis, D., Sørheim, R., & Djupdal, K. (2022). The social structure of entrepreneurial education as a scientific field. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 21(1), 61-81.

Mansoori, Y., & Lackeus, M. (2020). Comparing effectuation to discovery-driven planning, prescriptive entrepreneurship, business planning, lean startup, and design thinking. Small Business Economics, 54(3), 791-818.

Nabi, G., Liñán, F., Fayolle, A., Krueger, N., & Walmsley, A. (2017). The impact of entrepreneurship education in higher education: A systematic review and research agenda. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 16(2), 277-299.

Neck, H. M., & Corbett, A. C. (2018). The scholarship of teaching and learning entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy, 1(1), 8-41.

NEP (2020). National Education Policy 2020. Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf.

Preedy, S., Jones, P., Maas, G., & Duckett, H. (2020). Examining the perceived value of extracurricular enterprise activities in relation to entrepreneurial learning processes. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 27(7), 1085-1105.

QAA (2018). Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education: Guidance for UK Higher Education Providers. https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaas/enhancement-and-development/enterprise-and-entrpreneurship-education-2018.pdf?sfvrsn=15f1f981_8.

Reshetnikova, M. S. (2018). Innovation and entrepreneurship in China. European Research Studies, 21(3), 506-515.

Smith K., Rogers-Draycott, M., and Bozward, D. (2022) Full curriculum-based venture creation programmes: current knowledge and research challenges. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research, 28(4), 1106-1127.

Solomon, G. (2007). An examination of entrepreneurship education in the United States. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 14(2), 168-182.

Thomassen, M. L., Middleton, K. W., Ramsgaard, M. B., Neergaard, H., & Warren, L. (2019). Conceptualizing context in entrepreneurship education: a literature review. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 26(5), 863-886.

Dr. Kelly Smith
Dr. Alexandros Kakouris
Guest Editors

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• entrepreneurship education
• enterprise education
• curriculum innovation
• programme design
• youth entrepreneurship