Entrepreneurship education is growing worldwide, but key educational and didactical issues remain. What are we talking about when we talk about entrepreneurship education? What are we really doing ...when we teach or educate people in entrepreneurship, in terms of the nature and the impact of our interventions? What do we know about the appropriateness, the relevancy, the coherency, the social usefulness and the efficiency of our initiatives and practices in entrepreneurship education? Addressing these issues and challenges, this article suggests that at least two major evolutions might reinforce the future of entrepreneurship education. First, we need strong intellectual and conceptual foundations, drawing from the fields of entrepreneurship and education, to strengthen our entrepreneurship courses. And finally, we also need to deeply reflect on our practices, as researchers and educators, taking a more critical stance toward a too often adopted "taken for granted" position.
Entrepreneurial intention is a rapidly evolving field of research, with a growing number of studies using entrepreneurial intention as a powerful theoretical framework. Some authors, however, are now ...calling for scholars to rethink the future of research on entrepreneurial intentions. This paper addresses this issue and, on the basis of a number of knowledge gaps in the literature, proposes future directions for research.
Limitations of the research on the various leadership and strategic issues facing universities seeking to become more entrepreneurial has led this special issue to focus on the management, ...development, and implementation of this vision. We have solicited original research on the strategic challenges that these universities currently encounter. Researchers in management and related disciplines have contributed to this field of inquiry, which is having growing implications for our universities and stakeholders in the social and economic spheres. We begin by tracing an overarching framework, to which we add brief descriptions of the contributing papers in this special issue. To conclude, we outline future research goals and discuss how, around the world, academic actors involved in university development - such as university managers and policy makers - could view the ideas presented here.
•Entrepreneurial universities' decisions depend on a wide range of dynamic organizational capabilities.•There are synergetic combinations of environmental factors enabling universities becoming more entrepreneurial.•Teaching needs to develop mindsets that facilitate learning that is empowering, experiential, cooperative and reflective.•Universities need clear objectives for their entrepreneurship agenda and assess outcomes against these objectives.•University leaders need to internally define, visualize, and communicate the true meaning of an entrepreneurial university.
The purpose of this paper and the special issue is to improve our understanding of the theoretical, empirical, managerial and political implications of emerging models of entrepreneurial universities ...in the new social and economic landscape. We accomplish this objective by examining the role of entrepreneurial universities as drivers of innovation and entrepreneurship activities. Our analysis starts with an overview by outlining an overarching framework. This allows us to highlight the contributions made in this special issue within the framework. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research and discuss implications for university managers, policy makers, and other academic agents involved in the development of entrepreneurial/innovation ecosystems.
This paper introduces Technology Business Incubation (TBI) as a field of study and practice, exploring the concept, its evolution, and scholarship. Science parks, incubators and accelerators are TBI ...mechanisms considered to be important policy tools for supporting innovation and technology-oriented entrepreneurial growth. Their popularity is premised on the belief that these mechanisms provide critical value-added inputs essential for the creation and development of innovative Technology-Based Firms (TBFs). However, determining what type of TBI mechanisms and policies are most conducive to achieving the desired results is very much mission-driven and context-specific. A review of the past three decades of incubation literature, emerging practice, and future trends reveals that despite ongoing debate about their contribution and challenges, the future of TBIs is promising, and there are rich opportunities for research.
Why do some individuals decide they want to create businesses and then actually do so? Why do others decide against this course of action, even though they appear to have what it takes to succeed? ...These two questions were among the first that researchers in the field of entrepreneurship tried to answer. Recently, it seems that the problem is much more difficult to solve than it first appeared thirty years ago. The venture creation phenomenon is a complex one, covering a wide variety of situations. The purpose of this 2007 book is to improve our understanding of this complexity by offering both a theory of the entrepreneurial process and practical advice on how to start a new business and manage it effectively. Entrepreneurship and New Value Creation is a fascinating, research-driven book that will appeal to graduate students, researchers and reflective practitioners concerned with the dynamics of the entrepreneurial process.
Using a teaching model framework, we systematically review empirical evidence on the impact of entrepreneurship education (EE) in higher education on a range of entrepreneurial outcomes, analyzing ...159 published articles from 2004 to 2016. The teaching model framework allows us for the first time to start rigorously examining relationships between pedagogical methods and specific outcomes. Reconfirming past reviews and meta-analyses, we find that EE impact research still predominantly focuses on short-term and subjective outcome measures and tends to severely underdescribe the actual pedagogies being tested. Moreover, we use our review to provide an up-to-date and empirically rooted call for less obvious, yet greatly promising, new or underemphasized directions for future research on the impact of university-based entrepreneurship education. This includes, for example, the use of novel impact indicators related to emotion and mind-set, focus on the impact indicators related to the intention-to-behavior transition, and exploring the reasons for some contradictory findings in impact studies including person-, context-, and pedagogical model-specific moderators.
Scholars have long studied small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and recognize the need for SMEs to postulate strategies to compete and succeed in the global market. In the current ...ultracompetitive business environment, SMEs face several internal and external challenges. In this introduction to the special issue (SI), we review the theoretical models and frameworks in this stream of research and outline some research questions that could be potentially used in future research in this era of globalization. The six papers selected for inclusion in this SI analyze this field from different angles, offering interesting overviews on the present situation of research in the field, as well as relevant new findings and perspectives for future research.
In this paper, we deal with the problem of computing the distance to a surface (a curve in two dimensional) and consider several distance function approximation methods which are based on solving ...partial differential equations (PDEs) and finding solutions to variational problems. In particular, we deal with distance function estimation methods related to the Poisson‐like equations and generalized double‐layer potentials. Our numerical experiments are backed by novel theoretical results and demonstrate efficiency of the considered PDE‐based distance function approximations.
In this paper, we deal with the problem of computing the distance to a surface (a curve in two dimensional) and consider several distance function approximation methods which are based on solving partial differential equations (PDEs) and finding solutions to variational problems. In particular, we deal with distance function estimation methods related to the Poisson‐like equations and generalized double‐layer potentials. Our numerical experiments are backed by novel theoretical results and demonstrate efficiency of the considered PDE‐based distance function approximations.
•Combining PSED and ONET data, we test the relationship between occupational characteristics and entrepreneurial effort.•Occupations providing workers with managerial knowledge foster ...effort-performance and instrumentality beliefs, indirectly contributing to increase entrepreneurial effort.•Occupational arduousness and lack of self-accomplishment push workers towards entrepreneurship through fostering instrumentality beliefs.•There is a direct effect of occupational arduousness on entrepreneurial effort.
Entrepreneurial effort triggers action towards business creation and constitutes the ultimate link between intention and action. Although occupations play a significant role in entrepreneurial entry, extant research has not thoroughly investigated primary occupational characteristics as specific antecedents of entrepreneurial effort. We contribute to this line of research by proposing and testing a model in which three occupational characteristics at the occupational level (managerial knowledge, self-accomplishment, and arduousness) are correlated with two cognitive factors at the individual level (effort-performance and instrumentality beliefs) that in turn affect behavior (entrepreneurial effort). We draw upon expectancy theory to motivate our model and combine data from the PSED and O*NET to test our hypotheses. We find compelling evidence that individuals facing arduous working conditions and lacking personal accomplishment in their salaried jobs will be more committed to their new business. In addition, we find that entrepreneurs coming from occupations involving high levels of managerial knowledge tend to put more effort into the new venture.
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