Entrepreneurial education and learning at universities: exploring multilevel contingencies

Abstract

Despite the worldwide increase in entrepreneurship education offered at universities, there is an ongoing debate whether and under which conditions this type of education contributes to students’ entrepreneurial learning. Building on human capital theory, we hypothesize that the exposure to various entrepreneurship education initiatives has an inverted U-shaped relationship with entrepreneurial learning outcomes. We also argue that this relationship is moderated by the entrepreneurial experience of the students, the teaching pedagogy applied in entrepreneurial initiatives offered at the university and the prevalence of opportunity-driven entrepreneurship in the country. A multi-level analysis on a cross-country sample of 87,918 students resulting from GUESSS (‘Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey’) strongly confirms our hypotheses, and allows us to discuss implications for researchers, educators and policy makers with respect to the nature of entrepreneurial learning, the design of entrepreneurial education programs, as well as the contextual conditions that impact entrepreneurial learning outcomes.     

University training for entrepreneurial competencies: Its impact on intention of venture creation

This study tests the effect of entrepreneurship education programmes on the entrepreneurial competencies and intention of university students in order to confirm (or disconfirm) conventional wisdom that entrepreneurial education increases the intention to start a business. We address the following research question: Do entrepreneurship education programmes raise the entrepreneurial competencies and intention of students? We used a pretest-post-test quasi-experimental design. Data were collected from 864 university students of Castilla & León (Spain), from 863 students (403 taking the programme and 460 in a control group). The results showed that students in the ‘programme’ group increased their competencies and intention towards self-employment, whereas students in the control group did not. The findings contribute to the theories of planned behaviour and to the literature of entrepreneurship education itself, by revealing the effect of specific benefits for the students derived from the entrepreneurship ‘programme’.     

The moderating role of anticipated affective ambivalence in the formation of entrepreneurial intentions

Students’ predictions of the affective consequences of starting their own business encompass, simultaneously, positive and negative thoughts and feelings (anticipated affective ambivalence). We theorize that anticipated affective ambivalence constitutes a significant element in the entrepreneurial process holding a central role in the realization of entrepreneurial intentions. In the herein presented research, we propose and test a model within which anticipated affective ambivalence is expected to moderate the impact of attitudes towards entrepreneurship (ATT), subjective norms (SN), and perceived behavioral control (PBC) on entrepreneurial intention. Results from a large sample of university student participants found that anticipated affective ambivalence moderated the effects of ATT and SN on entrepreneurial intention (INT) but not the effect of PBC on INT. Theoretically the findings introduce affective ambivalence in the area of nascent entrepreneurship and within the Theory of Planned Behavior model. Practically, the study highlights affective ambivalence in the context of universities’ increasing interest to promote entrepreneurship and to develop suitable educational programs.     

The determinants of business start-ups in tertiary education: evidence for Greece through a panel data approach

Up to now there is no consensus in the relevant literature on the exact factors that lead a student to entrepreneurship. In addition, evidence on differences in the entrepreneurial activity among regions and, even more, in the entrepreneurial education provided by individual universities, within the same region, call for context-specific longitudinal studies. The primary objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the determinants that influence the propensity of young students of a Greek University to establish a new business venture. The methodological approach employed is based on a questionnaire survey collecting data from 1,500 students, spanning the period 2005–2010. Data has been processed through the use of a panel cointegration and panel causality methodology. The empirical findings entail useful insights on students’ attitudes and perceptions of entrepreneurship.     

Teaching entrepreneurship using Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

Entrepreneurship as a skill and process is increasingly being taught as a part of various university educational programmes. The literature is divided on the effectiveness of traditional methods to teach entrepreneurship. We consider the achievement of students learning outcomes in entrepreneurship course that is offered as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). The results suggest that the MOOC is a suitable platform to teach entrepreneurship as it provide tools to enable students? collaborative learning as well as improve individuals? affective key entrepreneurial aspects such as such opportunity recognition and resource acquisition.     

In what sense ‘regional development?’: entrepreneurship,underdevelopment and strong tradition in the periphery

This paper explores whether entrepreneurship can help less successful regions to improve their regional economic situation, without all the benefits that entrepreneurship brings when being ‘stripped out’ to more successful regions. The paper uses the idea that peripheral regions possess qualities of tradition and underdevelopment, and that these help to anchor new firms into these regions, resistant to their concentration in core regions. The paper explores whether particular entrepreneurial events can be regarded as ‘densifying’ the regional entrepreneurial environment, thereby making a positive contribution to its economic development. The paper explores the role of these negative anchors to the entrepreneurial events and the densification process by following a sequence of high-technology spin-out firms in the North East of England. Using a realist methodology attempting to interview all the firms within the sequence which could be found, the paper discovers that quite positive advantages exist within these negative qualities.The paper then considers whether these processes, such as plant closure, might drive entrepreneurship in all regions.     

Entrepreneurship in action: bringing together the individual,organizational and institutional dimensions of entrepreneurial action

There is increasing recognition that entrepreneurship research needs to achieve a better balance between studying to entrepreneurial activities and setting these activities in their wider context. It is important that these good intentions are realized and one way of doing this is to bring together ethnographic research with concepts from sociology and from pragmatist thinking. In this study, field research material is interwoven with a set of key concepts to ensure that balanced attention is paid to issues at the levels of the enterprising individual, the organization and societal institutions. The field research is innovative in combining depth study of several enterprises and their founders with the analysis of broader aspects of ‘entrepreneurship in society’. It achieves this through a process of ‘everyday ethnographic’ observation, reading, conversation and ongoing analysis. In the spirit of a pragmatist conception of social science, the underlying logic of entrepreneurial action is identified. This is a logic which needs to be appreciated by all of those who wish to understand and/or engage with the entrepreneurial dimension of contemporary social and economic life.     

Toward rigor and parsimony: a primary validation of Kolvereid’s (1996) entrepreneurial attitudes scales

Questioning the validity of scholarly work is not a typical path to publication in the management field. However, although considerable scholarship assesses entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions models of behaviour, methodological weaknesses in scale development have hampered scholars’ ability to rigorously interpret and build upon their research findings. We review 20 years of research and discover that the pioneer measure of entrepreneurial attitudes as a predictor of self-employment intentions, has yet to be empirically validated. We show that construct and measurement differences, one-off modifications to existing scales and a lack of adequate justification may partially explain why studies in the entrepreneurship education domain have produced inconsistent results. We address this limitation by performing factor analytic techniques on data from two sets of English-speaking university students from two North American countries. The result is a more parsimonious and streamlined ‘mini-Kolvereid’ scale. We further demonstrate that this scale is an effective predictor of entrepreneurial intentions.     

Emotional competencies and cognitive antecedents in shaping student’s entrepreneurial intention: the moderating role of entrepreneurship education

This paper focuses on the analytic thinking of emotional competencies and their influence, in particular, in shaping university students’ entrepreneurial intentions, backed by an extended model of Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour, and analyses the moderating role of entrepreneurial education among the variables under study. The results, derived from an ex-ante and ex-post questionnaire addressed to Spanish university students engaged in a compulsory entrepreneurship course, were subjected to structural equation modelling analysis. Our findings show that entrepreneurship by university students is favoured by the development of their emotional competencies, due to the direct influence of the latter in shaping entrepreneurial intention and its positive impact on their cognitive antecedents (entrepreneurial attitudes and perceived self-efficacy), and suggest that students with a higher degree of emotional competencies who receive entrepreneurship education will have a more positive attitude towards entrepreneurship and will perceive themselves more capable of becoming entrepreneurs. The primary contribution of this paper is to spotlight the use of emotional competencies in encouraging entrepreneurship, and to heighten awareness of the positive effect of education on emotionally-competent students, a factor that should be taken into account to improve entrepreneurship education programmes.

     

‘And now I’m free’: Women’s empowerment and emancipation through entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia and Sweden

Critical perspectives have called for the study of women’s entrepreneurship as a route to social change. This ‘social turn’ claims women are empowered and/or emancipated through entrepreneurship with limited problematisation of how these interchangeably used concepts operate. Using an institutional perspective in combination with a narrative approach, we investigate women entrepreneurs’ life stories on their ‘road to freedom’ where entrepreneurial activity enables them to ‘break free’ from particular gendered constraints. Through juxtaposing women’s narratives in the contexts of Saudi Arabia and Sweden, the relationship between empowerment and emancipation is disentangled and (re)conceptualised. The findings distinguish between empowerment narrated as individual practices to achieve freedom for the self within institutional structures and emancipation as narrated as a wish to challenge and change structures of power and reach collative freedom. The yearning for collective emancipation propels women’s stories of entrepreneurship by raising expectations for entrepreneurship as a vehicle for institutional change. Such stories may fascinate and inspire others to engage in entrepreneurial endeavours to become empowered, but whether they reach emancipation remains an empirical question to be answered. The performative dimension of entrepreneurial narratives is, however, their ability to turn emancipation into an (un)reachable object of desire, with a quest for even more individual empowerment and entrepreneurial activity, at the same time excluding other forms of human conduct as conducive for change.     

The impact of a STEM-based entrepreneurship program on the entrepreneurial intention of secondary school female students

Despite dedicated effort and research in the last two decades, the entrepreneurship field is still limited by little evidence-based knowledge of the impacts of entrepreneurship programs on the entrepreneurial intention of students in pre-university levels of study. Further, gender equity continues to be an issue in the entrepreneurial sector, particularly in STEM-focused entrepreneurship. In this context, this study was designed to explore the effects of a one-day female-focused STEM-based entrepreneurship program (for brevity, we call it the OzGirlsEntrepreneurship program) on the entrepreneurial intention of secondary school female students. The study collected data from two surveys completed by 193 secondary school female students, aged 14–16 years, who participated in the OzGirlsEntrepreneurship program. This program encouraged girls to develop and implement creative computational solutions to socially relevant problems, with an Internet of Things (IoT) component using the micro:bit device. The findings reveal that a key factor in the development of entrepreneurial attitudes in young female students is associated with soft-skills development, particularly in the areas of creative thinking, risk-taking, problem-solving, and leadership development. The importance of meaningful human connections, including positive role modelling and peer to peer learning were also important factors in fostering entrepreneurial intent. With these factors in mind, our findings highlight that the OzGirlsEntrepreneurship program substantially increased the entrepreneurial intention of secondary school female students. In addition, this study offers actionable implications and recommendations to develop and deliver entrepreneurship education programs for secondary school level students.

     

Socio-cultural factors and female entrepreneurship

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the main socio-cultural factors that influence women entrepreneurship in Catalonia, using institutional economics as a theoretical framework. The empirical research employs logistic regression models (rare events logit), utilizing data obtained from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project (GEM). The main findings highlight that ‘fear of failure’ and ‘perceived capabilities’ are the most important socio-cultural factors on the probability of becoming a woman entrepreneur. The research contributes both theoretically, advancing knowledge of the socio-cultural factors that affect female entrepreneurship, and practically, helping in the development of educational programmes and support policies to promote entrepreneurial activity.     

Exploring entrepreneurs’ human capital components and effects on learning orientation in early internationalizing firms

This study aims to enhance our understanding of the role of entrepreneurs’ human capital components and the influences on learning orientation in early internationalizing firms. Drawing from the integration of human capital theory, resource-based view theory, learning theory, and on the literature of international entrepreneurship and strategic management, a research model is proposed and consists of five constructs, namely international business skill, international business knowledge, entrepreneurial competence, managerial competence and learning orientation. The empirical analysis was carried out on a sample of 158 early internationalizing firms in a food industry in Thailand. Partial least square technique was conducted to test the structural equation models and hypotheses. This followed by some illustrative case studies as supplementary to the empirical findings. The results confirm our hypotheses and support the proposed research model. This study yielded interesting findings in which an entrepreneur’s skill and knowledge in international business enhance entrepreneurial and managerial competencies. These competencies, in turn, play an important role in influencing a firm’s strategic learning orientation     

Business model innovation in corporate entrepreneurship: exploratory insights from corporate accelerators

Corporate accelerators are a rapidly growing entrepreneurial phenomenon occurring in different business contexts and business models within corporate entrepreneurship. Corporate accelerators are considered as an innovation fostering approach within new ventures provided by start-ups. The aim of the paper is twofold: firstly, to explore the motives behind corporations’ engagement with start-ups in launching corporate accelerators, and secondly, to identify the corporate benefits and challenges of this business model innovation. The research design is based on a qualitative interpretative approach exploiting a triangulation of methods by using in-depth interviews (IDI) with corporate managers involved in development of corporate accelerators as well as a focus group interview (FGI) with industry experts. In addition, secondary data were applied to strengthen the exploratory research. The study demonstrates that a wide range of benefits stem from the accelerator activities which can ultimately can initiate changes in large companies. Our research expands on prior findings and suggests that corporate accelerators are driven by internal and external push and pull motives. The study contributes to expanding the scope of corporate entrepreneurship research in regard to the challenges and benefits of corporate accelerators. It provides evidence that corporate accelerators are a source of innovation that can be used to foster entrepreneurial-market logic and entrepreneurial learning.

     

International entrepreneurship and the small business

The topic of ‘international entrepreneurship’ is becoming increasingly popular with researchers concerned with examining how international and entrepreneurial activities intersect when people in organizations engage in pro-active brokering and risk-taking behaviour in cross-border contexts. Some caution is needed in over-generalizing the meaning and significance of international entrepreneurship – especially in relation to small businesses. Not all entrepreneurial risk-taking, brokering and opportunity-seeking activities lead to internationalization (as the statistics on small business international activities indicate). This might suggest then that the only truly internationally entrepreneurial firms are those that are ‘born global’. However, their entrepreneurial activities are more ‘spatial’, concerned with what can be constructed again in relation to global markets rather than in relation to the local/regional context in which the business is located. For small firms that internationalize a few years after start-up (late starters), processes of international entrepreneurship are different. For ‘later starters’, international entrepreneurship is distinctive in that it is characterized by extending and modifying entrepreneurial understandings and practices that have been socially constructed in relation to the local and regional context in which the small firm is located.     

Family embeddedness and entrepreneurship experience: a study of Indian migrant women entrepreneurs in Australia

India has emerged as a major source of migrants for developed countries including Australia; yet, there is a dearth of research on Indian migrant entrepreneurs, particularly women. Using qualitative methods of enquiry, we explore the perceptions of Indian migrant women entrepreneurs (MWEs) and their partners in Melbourne, Australia, about their entrepreneurship experiences from a family embeddedness perspective. More specifically, we explore how family embeddedness of Indian MWEs is influenced by certain factors which in turn influence their entrepreneurship experience. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurship among Indian MWEs is a complex phenomenon influenced by their being an Indian, a woman and a new Australian, all of which interact and influence their family dynamics and entrepreneurial experience. Our findings shed light on the duality of Indian culture which exerts both an enabling and a constraining influence on the family dynamics of MWEs, the constraining role of gender and the positive impact of their integration into the host country’s sociocultural context which all influence their family embeddedness and entrepreneurship. Contributing to the discussion on ‘ethnic’ and ‘women entrepreneurship’ from a family embeddedness perspective, we offer policy implications for facilitating entrepreneurship in the growing but under-researched cohort of Indian MWEs.     

‘Embrace the masculine; attenuate the feminine’ – gender,identity work and entrepreneurial legitimation in the nascent context

This article critically analyses how gender bias impacts upon women’s efforts to legitimate nascent ventures. Given the importance of founder identity as a proxy for entrepreneurial legitimacy at nascency, we explore the identity work women undertake when seeking to claim legitimacy for their emerging ventures in a prevailing context of masculinity. In so doing, we challenge taken for granted norms pertaining to legitimacy and question the basis upon which that knowledge is claimed. In effect, debates regarding entrepreneurial legitimacy are presented as gender neutral yet, entrepreneurship is a gender biased activity. Thus, we argue it is essential to recognize how gendered assumptions impinge upon the quest for legitimacy. To illustrate our analysis, we use retrospective and real time empirical evidence evaluating legitimating strategies as they unfold, our findings reveal tensions between feminine identities such as ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ and those of the prototypical entrepreneur. This dissonance prompted women to undertake specific forms of identity work to bridge the gap between femininity, legitimacy and entrepreneurship. We conclude by arguing that the pursuit of entrepreneurial legitimacy during nascency is a gendered process which disadvantages women and has the potential to negatively impact upon the future prospects of their fledgling ventures.     

创业拼凑与机会开发过程模型--基于大学生创业的单案例分析

在"双创"教育的指引下,越来越多的大学生投身到创业活动之中,如何提高大学生创业存活率成为理论界与实践界关注的焦点。本文以一家大学生新创企业为例,采用纵向案例研究构建了大学生创业情境下"机会-资源一体化"过程模型,揭示了大学生新创企业利用创业拼凑进行机会开发的微观机制。研究发现在探索期,新创企业以资源为导向,采用物质拼凑和技能拼凑,实现"发现型机会"的开发;在稳定期,新创企业以机会为导向,采用网络拼凑和技能拼凑,实现"发现+创造型"机会的开发;在发展期,新创企业以顾客为导向,采用客户拼凑和技能拼凑,实现"创造型机会"的开发。研究结果可为揭示创业拼凑内部机理的形成提供方向,也可为从校园走出的大学生新创企业利用手边资源、开发有潜力的创业机会、实现企业可持续发展提供有益的借鉴和启示。     

The onto-politics of entrepreneurial experimentation: re-reading Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s understanding of ‘experimental systems’

ABSTRACT

In this article, we argue that there is a need to theorize the relationship between entrepreneurship and the political beyond the currently dominant neo-liberal and emancipatory narrative by turning to an onto-political conception of entrepreneurship based on the processes of entrepreneurial experimentation. In entrepreneurship studies, the relevance and the potential of experimentation for shaping new organizational realities has only been explored marginally. Through re-reading the thinking on ‘experimental systems’ by the science historian Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and connecting it to Annemarie Mol’s notion of ‘ontological politics’, we develop a conceptual framework for entrepreneurial experimentation which we document with the illustration of an art enterprise. The framework that we propose focuses on the interwoven embodied, material and processual dynamics of entrepreneurial experimentation and reframes entrepreneurial world-making as a speculative process driven by material reconfigurations and bodily connections. As a consequence, we argue that this model is able to emphasize the intricate political dimension inscribed in processes of entrepreneurial experimentation through their onto-political force of reconfiguring systems of ‘self-others-things’. Furthermore, the model highlights that this capacity of ‘world-making’ cannot be realized without articulating the tensions and resistances that entrepreneurial endeavours often need to navigate and negotiate while reconfiguring and challenging dominant socio-material orders.     

Creating a community of difference in entrepreneurship scholarship

This article argues for alternative forms of inquiry for exploring aspects of entrepreneurship scholarship that are often unseen, ignored or minimized. The label, ‘The European School of Entrepreneurship’, might serve as a useful rubric for identifying a community of scholars with tendencies towards the following: (1) an interest in the history of ideas that inform entrepreneurship scholarship, (2) a willingness to step outside of the entrepreneurship field, itself, to embrace a variety of ideas, particularly from philosophy and the humanities and (3) a concern for the ‘other’, so as to challenge the unspoken and often unrecognized ‘taken-for-granted’ aspects of what entrepreneurship is and what it might be. Such tendencies are fundamentally different by degree (rather than contrast) from current norms; yet, these tendencies can make a significant difference in current scholarly practice in entrepreneurship, as well as our understanding of the entrepreneurial phenomenon.