Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify and apply best practices in university entrepreneurship education to the creation of a new MBA in entrepreneurship and innovation management. It is a direct response to calls for a total re-envisioning of entrepreneurship education and criticism that existing programs lack rigour, content, pedagogy, measurement and an established definition. Design/methodology/approach – This article uses reviews of the literature to identify normative best practices and how to apply them to the new program. An entrepreneurship program design framework (EPDF) was created and applied to a new MBA program being developed in central Germany. Findings – Most studies describe aspects of current programs (e.g. lists of courses) but almost none say what should be in a program. Others provide abstract guidance (e.g. programs should define entrepreneurship) but do not give specific recommendations (e.g. what the definition should be). The proposed EPDF provided a rigorous structure for reviewing the literature, designing the new program and establishing specific best practice recommendations for defining program goals, content, pedagogy and measurement of student transformation. Research limitations/implications – The entrepreneurship literature is largely silent on normative best practice guidance, so the proposed application of best practices should be evaluated in that context. Originality/value – Previous articles present relatively abstract frameworks and concepts, whereas this article is a direct application of the practical implications of these concepts. The proposed normative best practice guidelines may be somewhat controversial, but should stimulate useful discussion.

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This article describes how to measure student transformation primarily within a university entrepreneurship degree program. Student transformation is defined as changes in knowledge (“Head”), skills (“Hand”), and attitudinal (“Heart”) learning outcomes. Following the institutional impact model, student transformation is the primary goal of education and all other program goals and aspects of quality desired by stakeholders are either input factors (professors, courses, facilities, support, etc.) or output performance (number of startups, average starting salary, % employment, etc.). This goal-setting framework allows competing stakeholder quality expectations to be incorporated into a continuous process improvement (CPI) model when establishing program goals. How to measure these goals to implement TQM methods is shown. Measuring student transformation as the central focus of a program promotes harmony among competing stakeholders and also provides a metric on which other program decisions (e.g., class size, assignments, and pedagogical technique) may be based. Different stakeholders hold surprisingly different views on defining program quality. The proposed framework provides a useful way to bring these competing views into a CPI cycle to implement TQM requirements of accreditation. The specific entrepreneurial learning outcome goals described in the tables in this article may also be used directly by educators in nonaccredited programs and single courses/workshops or for other audiences.

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