Abstract
Taking the salient case of an Italian Foundation that started to create a Pan-African university alliance for entrepreneurship education, we conducted a field study based on interviews and observation for a period of seven years. The aim was to understand how to overcome challenges that arise when fostering entrepreneurship education programs (EEP) by orchestrating an inter-organizational network in Africa. Our study revealed that proximity and contextualization play a strategic and crucial role in orchestrating an entrepreneurial eco-system in a context shaped by resource scarcity and solid societal as well as economic problems. We contribute to scholarly and practitioner understandings of how to establish effectively EEPs together with the orchestration of an entrepreneurial eco-system in Africa.
Highlights
Over the last decades, entrepreneurship has become an important economic and social topic as well as an oftenresearched subject (Fayolle and Gailly, 2008) and simultaneously, entrepreneurship education has gained more attention from entrepreneurship scholars (Harris & Gibson, 2008; Matlay, 2006; Mitra & Matlay, 2004)
The findings reveal identified different stages of the evolution of a Pan-African university alliance in collaboration with an Italian foundation
By providing a rare examination of the discussed case, we extend entrepreneurship education research by looking at a single program but by analyzing the orchestration of an entrepreneurial eco-system in Africa based on the establishment of a Pan-African university alliance
Summary
Entrepreneurship has become an important economic and social topic as well as an oftenresearched subject (Fayolle and Gailly, 2008) and simultaneously, entrepreneurship education has gained more attention from entrepreneurship scholars (Harris & Gibson, 2008; Matlay, 2006; Mitra & Matlay, 2004). Scholars have started to focus on how to design an effective entrepreneurship education programs (EEP), which primarily embrace studies with respect to competence models in order to understand which skills and actions are required in order to teach entrepreneurship (Gielnik et al, 2015, Nabi et al, 2015). In this scenario, EEPs has been recognized as one of the instruments for fostering entrepreneurial attitudes, intentions, and competences and this view has led to a dramatic rise in the number and status of EPPs in colleges and universities worldwide Recent studies have been limited towards studying single units of EAI Endorsed Transactions on
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