“What is Value?” – A Framework for Analyzing and Facilitating Entrepreneurial Value Creation

Journal article, 2018

Entrepreneurship viewed as new value creation is a perspective gaining ground in entrepreneurial education. Educators have found it to be a helpful approach in order to escape a situation where the two established ways to infuse entrepreneurship into education are both quite problematic. A value creation view on entrepreneurship, however, currently lacks a clear answer to a crucial question: What is value? Responding to this research gap, the article presents a value framework consisting of five different kinds of value: economic, enjoyment, social, harmony and influence value. Each kind of value can be experienced and created both for oneself and for others, thus constituting a total of ten different perspectives on value. This value framework has in practice been useful for teachers working with educational design. It has also been useful for research on assessment of the impact entrepreneurial education has on students, leading to new insights that could improve the effectiveness of entrepreneurial education. The value framework also casts new light on what entrepreneurship is and why people engage in entrepreneurship. A limitation of the work presented here is the inherent difficulty in conducting a systematic literature review on a term as generic as “value”.