Variations in University entrepreneurship education: An empirical study of an evolving field

Abstract University entrepreneurship education is in the embryonic stage, still a new venture in itself. Recent years have shown unabated growth in the number of universities offering entrepreneurship courses, but the subject is still considered suspect by many faculty and administrators. Effectively meeting university resistance to entrepreneurship course-work first requires an appreciation of the perceptions and misperceptions of the faculty and administration. Once the viewpoints are understood, counteractive communication strategies can be developed. Perceptions may include the following: ( a ) “small business” (vs. entrepreneurship) is a low-status realm associated with poor-quality research, and small is by connotation less worthwhile than large; ( b ) sophisticated management practices reside in larger firms and these practices coincide well with the functional organization in business colleges; and ( c ) entrepreneurship is a fad. More important, however, is the perception that “non-industry, non-stage-of-the-business-life-cycle, non-size truths apply to all,” and that entrepreneurship is therefore too specialized an area for scholarly endeavor. Yet a hard sciences scholar recently pondered, “How could the business discipline ever hope to develop comprehensive theories of business behavior without the equivalent in biology of developmental biology? How do organisms grow and mature into Fortune 500 firms?” With this backdrop an in-depth survey of expert opinion is presented, based on the beliefs and experiences of 15 highly regarded university entrepreneurship educators. These peer-identified respondents reacted to a wide variety of factors that were hypothesized to affect the outcomes of entrepreneurship education efforts. They included ( a ) educational objectives, ( b ) administrative and program development issues, and ( c ) course attributes. Although there were a variety of educational objectives cited by the respondents, most important was to “increase awareness and understanding of the process involving in initiating and managing a new business enterprise.” Other important objectives included attention to entrepreneurship as a career option, contributing to understanding functional business interrelationships, and attention to the characteristics of the entrepreneur. Other objectives concerned building students' selfconfidence, opportunity sensitivity, and analytical skills. Attention to the role of new and smaller firms in the economy was not rated as important. Organizationally, it was viewed as critical to have the support of the college administration. It was not universally agreed that an entrepreneurship major is desirable, with a bimodal response distribution. For universities with multiple courses, there appear to be three conceptual bases, sometimes interspersed, including the business functions, the business plan, and the business life cycle. It was agreed that entrepreneurship coursework should be more experientally oriented than other business school coursework, that the involvement of adjunct faculty should not be minimized, and that faculty research is important to an entrepreneurship education program. There was lukewarm support for business outreach programs and disagreement over the desirability of a student entrepreneurship club. Entrepreneurship course features considered most important were development of a business plan project and entrepreneurs as speakers and role models. Cases ranked next in importance followed by lectures and assigned readings. The future will bring experimentation with various program and course attributes, more research on pedagogy with the measurement of learning outcomes, the increased entree of entrepreneurship Ph.D.'s, and the maturation of this early-stage venture into entrepreneurship education.