“If You Want to Work Fast, Go Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Go Together: A Case for Shifting Entrepreneurship Education Towards Team-Based Trainings”

Abstract

Building up entrepreneurial ecosystems has become vitally important for higher education institutions across the world. Be it to tackle high numbers of unemployment amongst the youth, to drive innovation or leverage upon the strengths of particular individuals, it is key for a long-term transformation of societies to build support structures that would enable entrepreneurial thinking and acting to flourish. Therefore, nowadays, it is rare to find higher education institutions across the world that do not offer some sort of entrepreneurship education program. Be it in the form of elective or mandatory courses, short courses on individual topics at incubators, or specialized degree programs, such programs have become an integral part of higher education institutions’ strategy to equip their students with the transversal skill of entrepreneurship that is deemed relevant for all students, irrespective of their professional background. Especially entrepreneurship education approaches have gained a lot of interest from researchers, as with an increasing number of programs there is a need for systematically understanding the pros and cons of different approaches. Apart from the plethora of approaches, starting a business is not a straightforward project. Much more often it is a long-term process with many twists and uncertainties that need to be tackled. Aspiring entrepreneurs face different challenges that are related to different developmental stages of their business ideas. Therefore, entrepreneurship education also needs to address the students’ needs that arise in these different stages.