Unleashing Entrepreneurial Education: Developing Entrepreneurial Mindsets, Competencies, and Long-Term Behavior

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education (EE) is rapidly increasing in popularity and is now being taught at nearly every university worldwide. EE has re-cently taken an experiential turn emphasizing learning through action, working with materials, venture creation, stakeholder interaction, team-work and reflection, often in dedicated learning spaces. Although expe-riential EE holds great promise for learning entrepreneurial skills and fostering successful entrepreneurs, its effects are not very well under-stood. Through four distinct papers, this dissertation seeks to close this knowledge gap by examining the short- and long-term effects of experi-ential EE. The first paper examines how pedagogical approaches in higher education cultivate entrepreneurial behavior and firm creation. By developing a categorization scheme of teaching methods, the first paper contributes to the categorization of EE initiatives while also showing that experiential education is an effective pedagogy for fostering entrepre-neurs both within and outside of EE. The second paper extends our knowledge of the immediate effects of EE by showing how domain-spe-cific education affects business and design students' beliefs in their own abilities and intentions to become entrepreneurs in unique ways. The third paper contributes to our understanding of the relationship between team formation strategies and entrepreneurship education, highlighting the importance of teaching a multitude of strategies for collaboration at an early stage. The fourth paper introduces the concept of topopraxis (where-how) to expand our understanding of how entrepreneurial learn-ing is achieved in the experiential classroom by showing that learning is enacted and enhanced through dedicated learning spaces. Taking to-gether these constituent parts, this dissertation shows that entrepreneurial teaching methods can be used to foster the important skills necessary for the future of work both within and outside of the EE context.