This article explores how students learn from venture creation in higher education by using a novel empirical approach: the Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET). This inductive research approach provides extraordinarily rich data that enable a thorough and holistic understanding of students’ learning processes. The participant selection differentiates students who pursue venturing throughout their entrepreneurship education programme and those who exit venturing halfway through, and the article is the first to pinpoint differences between how students with and without ventures in the same environment learn. The findings reveal that students who choose to exit their new ventures learn based on a community of practice – which is facilitated by other students’ venture creation – while the learning process of students who pursue venturing is in line with previous research. Thus, the present article contributes by empirically demonstrating what previous conceptual contributions have suggested: that researchers should emphasise situated and social learning as an integral element of students’ learning in action-based entrepreneurship education. For practice, the findings imply that entrepreneurship education programmes, in which students learn through venture creation, should be organised in a way that leads them to establish relationships and interact with each other on a regular basis.

The future engineer is labelled an entrepreneurial engineer, having networking, teamwork, opportunity recognition, creativity, risk management, and discipline-specific skills. Therefore, entrepreneurship education is being increasingly introduced in engineering education. The various educational designs used to introduce entrepreneurship education have been discussed extensively, but a clear scheme for the classification of such methods is not available. In this study, a classification scheme for entrepreneurship education is introduced by building on prior frameworks and authentic learning situations to differentiate educational approaches and learning contexts. We explore and combine different models of entrepreneurship education offered at 10 technical universities in the Nordic countries. Through this exploration, we identify three categories of learning contexts, which we label 'imitation', 'pretence', and 'real,' adding to the three classes of educational conceptions identified in the literature and verified through empirical data: 'teacher-directed', 'participatory', and 'self-directed'. This leads to a six-class taxonomy for entrepreneurship education approaches.

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