Entrepreneurship Education: Notes on an Ongoing Debate

Abstract

Summary Entrepreneurship education is assuming extraordinary relevance within academic programs all over the world, but there is very little known about it from a research perspective. This paper discusses the status of current research on entrepreneurship education, providing an overview of the academic debate on its main issues. The relationships between the core research issues are identified and avenues for further research are traced in order to foster the development of effective learning processes. Keywords : Entrepreneurship, Education, Research 1. Introduction The last decade has witnessed the powerful emergence of entrepreneurship research worldwide (Kuratko, 2003). There seems to be widespread recognition that entrepreneurship is the engine driving the economy and society of most nations (Brock and Evans, 1989; Acs, 1992; Carree and Thurik, 2002). Although entrepreneurship is not a new concept, it has gained increasing interest and research attention over the past 15 years: today entrepreneurship is considered the essential lever to cope with the new competitive landscape (Hitt and Reed, 2000). This has emerged for a number of reasons, such as the fact that entrepreneurship is perceived as bringing benefits at both the macro level of economic development (Birch, 1979) and also at the micro level of personal satisfaction and achievement (Anderson, Kirkwood and Jack, 1998). Parallel to the evolution of the field of entrepreneurship we can note an increasing interest in the development of educational programs to encourage and foster entrepreneurship (Solomon et al., 2002). Recent studies (Finkle and Deeds, 2001) show that the demand for entrepreneurship faculty has increased remarkably during the last decade. Moreover, the