Is Business Creation the Mean or the End of Entrepreneurship Education?: A Multiple Case Study Exploring Teaching Goals in Entrepreneurship Education

Carlos Albornoz Pardo

doi:10.4067/s0718-27242013000100001

Carlos Albornoz Pardo

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.4067/s0718-27242013000100001

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Abstract

Entrepreneurship education within higher education has experienced a remarkable expansion in the last 20 years (Green & Rice, 2007). However, entrepreneurship education is still in its infancy; professors propose diverse teaching goals and radically different teaching methods. This represents an obstacle to development of foundational and consistent curricula across the board (Cone, 2008). This study was designed to understand entrepreneurship instructors’ teaching goals. Results suggest that the group of instructors studied pursued two types of profoundly different teaching goals. Some of them were trying to teach how to start a successfully business while another group was trying to develop entrepreneurial skills. Those two types of teaching goals have important implications in terms of pre selection of students, the mandatory or voluntary character of the curriculum, and type of teaching methods used. For instance, if the goal is to create business, students should be selected according to the potential of their ideas, the regimen should be voluntary (students legitimately may want to become great employees), and business plan as teaching methods should be understood a mean rather than an end.

Highlights

Along with the accumulation of evidence supporting the role of entrepreneurship in economic development (Acs, 2002; Kuratko, 2005; Reynolds et al, 2005), governments have persisted in encouraging people to become entrepreneurs (Brannback & Carsrud, 2009)
In Chile, 4 million US dollars were allocated in 2011 to fund entrepreneurship education programs.These efforts tried to reproduce the conditions under which entrepreneurship emerges; one of these conditions is the existence of entrepreneurial skills among students and scientists (Phan & Foo, 2004)
The reason to exclude instructors who teach at doctoral level only is that most doctoral programs are designed to develop research skills and not entrepreneurial skills which are the focus of this study

Summary

Introduction

Along with the accumulation of evidence supporting the role of entrepreneurship in economic development (Acs, 2002; Kuratko, 2005; Reynolds et al, 2005), governments have persisted in encouraging people to become entrepreneurs (Brannback & Carsrud, 2009). In Chile, 4 million US dollars were allocated in 2011 to fund entrepreneurship education programs.These efforts tried to reproduce the conditions under which entrepreneurship emerges; one of these conditions is the existence of entrepreneurial skills among students and scientists (Phan & Foo, 2004). In addition to the interest of governments, the rise of entrepreneurship programs has been fueled by an unprecedented student demand for an education that provides the skills needed to succeed in an increasingly divergent business environment (Cooper, Bottomley, & Gordon, 2004). In the U.S, the number of universities reporting courses in entrepreneurship grew from 300 in the early 1980s to 1,050 in 1990 (Dickson, Solomon, & Weaver, 2008). The number of entrepreneurship courses that colleges and universities offer, grew from less than ten in 1970 (Kuratko, 2005) to over 2,000 in 2008 (Cone, 2008)

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