High-expectation start-ups are firms launched by entrepreneurs with high ambitions for growth. The encounter between new technology and entrepreneurship that characterizes such new ventures has a significant impact on the nature and speed of economic development, driving the growth of high-technology industries and helping to make the economic system open, complex and adaptive. Thus high-expectation entrepreneurship deserves special attention in entrepreneurship education. This paper introduces and explains the importance of high-expectation entrepreneurship. Then, using an approach borrowed from both experimental scientific research and the practice of medicine, the authors propose a form of business idea testing and entrepreneur training in a laboratory environment. The ability to transpose, test and iterate new ideas and models in a business laboratory has significant potential in terms of promoting rapid learning and the preliminary validation of a new business idea – thus cutting risk, reducing cost and maximizing revenue potential. The authors argue that this approach is far more appropriate for entrepreneurship development in the new economic environment than traditional business education models.

Whether or not a society can be called ‘entrepreneurial’ depends in part on the legitimacy and esteem accorded to those who pursue the entrepreneurial route. Communities in which entrepreneurship can thrive create more jobs and wealth. Entrepreneurship foments the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction by which the new replaces the old. New opportunities are perceived, capitalized and converted into marketable products or services. Fresh competition in the free market economy and the breaking down of international borders will significantly influence new company formation and the underlying models of entrepreneurial motion. Ample opportunities for creativity and innovation are driving the move towards the formation of small businesses that from the start enter into a fast and high-growth phase – the so-called ‘entrepreneurial growth’ companies. Is there a distinctive role for education in enhancing entrepreneurial capacity bringing together entrepreneurial capacity and opportunities, and thus expanding local entrepreneurial activity in the form of entrepreneurial growth companies? In addressing this question, the paper first looks at two basic models of entrepreneurial motion – the small business model and the growth model – and then investigates the concepts of entrepreneurial learning and organizations for entrepreneurial education (the entrepreneurial universities). Entrepreneurial universities foster interaction and networking. They embed entrepreneurship in academic culture in order to achieve economic returns from the knowledge generated through research projects, empowered teams of teachers, students and business people, face-to-face and electronic relationships, and networked enterprises emerging from their spin-off activity. Finally, the paper identifies agents in the market and seed funds as instrumental organizations in the role of entrepreneurial universities. Endowed with high education and marketable skills, those agents support the new company in creating its own market. Seed funds provide risk-bearing capital and management support, which are complementary ingredients to money and intangible assets from the founder, family and friends.

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