The Questions We Care About: Paradigms and Progression in Entrepreneurship Education

Abstract

One of the most frequently discussed topics in the entrepreneurship education literature is current practice in entrepreneurship education with regard to what is taught and how it is taught. The literature on entrepreneurship education is replete with statistics and reviews of entrepreneurship courses and programmes. In this paper, the authors take a different approach and propose a model that transcends the current understanding of entrepreneurship. Instead of asking what entrepreneurship education is and what it does, they ask what ideally it should be and should do. The authors suggest that there is a logical progression between existing approaches – paradigms – to teaching entrepreneurship, and that a fourth ‘new’ paradigm, ‘everyday practice’, constitutes the foundation for all other entrepreneurship education because it establishes the core entrepreneurial competence. They further identify four dimensions as the constituent elements of entrepreneurship as everyday practice.