Teaching and facilitating action-based entrepreneurship education: Addressing challenges towards a research agenda
Journal article, 2022

Entrepreneurship education is an increasingly distinct domain with particular approaches emphasizing experiential and action-based design. Action-based entrepreneurship education aims to deliver authenticity in entrepreneurial experiences while simultaneously facilitating learning and fair assessment. A venture creation program (VCP) is one such type of action-based entrepreneurship education which uses the creation of a new venture as the main vehicle for students' learning, complemented with more traditional educational content. Engaging students in creating real-life ventures enables unique opportunities for learning but introduces a tension between didactic and pragmatic approaches and thus various challenges for educators. This paper's purpose is to address current controversies related to VCPs and offer research-driven suggestions to key challenges. The empirical investigation, consisting of focus group data and individual interviews, builds on the accumulated knowledge of a global collaborative forum for VCPs—the VCP Forum—which consists of 11 VCPs in six countries in Europe and North America. The findings highlight three main areas that present challenges to educators: (1) facilitating students' venture creation processes, (2) assessment of the students' work connected to real-life activity, and (3) mitigating interaction with external stakeholders. The present paper contributes to entrepreneurship education research by suggesting areas for pedagogic development that need further investigation.

Entrepreneurship educationResearch agendaStudent venturesQualitative

Author

D. H. Haneberg

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Karen Williams Middleton

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Entrepreneurship and Strategy

Lise Aaboen

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Supply and Operations Management

International Journal of Management Education

1472-8117 (ISSN)

Vol. 20 3 100711

Subject Categories

Educational Sciences

Learning

Economics and Business

Pedagogical Work

Pedagogy

Driving Forces

Innovation and entrepreneurship

Learning and teaching

Pedagogical work

DOI

10.1016/j.ijme.2022.100711

More information

Latest update

12/19/2023