Experience-based learning in Entrepreneurship Education - a comparative study of four programmes in Europe

Abstract

Research has argued that in order to learn the practice of entrepreneurship, individuals must engage in entrepreneurial processes in order to gain experiential knowledge, often stated as ‘learning by doing’. Practitioners also emphasize that learning to be entrepreneurial is typically experiential. Today, an extensive and steadily growing number of entrepreneurship educations respond to the identified needs for experiential learning but studies on such programmes have often been single case descriptions. This paper investigates the experience-based learning practices across entrepreneurship programmes in four countries, in order to identify common and divergent trends. While the programmes have different structural frameworks, address different groups (ex. engineers, designers, business students), and deliver experiential situations through different means, the programmes share an emphasis on putting the learner centre-stage in the process, and requiring that the learner take shared responsibility for learning from the experience, particularly in regards to setting boundaries for engagement.