Entrepreneurial education and learning at universities: exploring multilevel contingencies

AbstractDespite the worldwide increase in entrepreneurship education offered at universities, there is an ongoing debate whether and under which conditions this type of education contributes to students' entrepreneurial learning. Building on human capital theory, we hypothesize that the exposure to various entrepreneurship education initiatives has an inverted U-shaped relationship with entrepreneurial learning outcomes. We also argue that this relationship is moderated by the entrepreneurial experience of the students, the teaching pedagogy applied in entrepreneurial initiatives offered at the university and the prevalence of opportunity-driven entrepreneurship in the country. A multi-level analysis on a cross-country sample of 87,918 students resulting from GUESSS ('Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey') strongly confirms our hypotheses, and allows us to discuss implications for researchers, educators and policy makers with respect to the nature of entrepreneurial learning, the desi..

How You Teach Matters! An Exploratory Study on the Relationship between Teaching Models and Learning Outcomes in Entrepreneurship Education

Although entrepreneurship can be taught in different ways, entrepreneurship education impact studies generally fall short with regard to acknowledging the teaching models of the programs they assess. This severely limits our understanding of how entrepreneurship education actually works. To address this gap, this study describes and implements a procedure to identify the teaching models of entrepreneurship education courses and shows how different teaching models are associated with entrepreneurial learning outcomes. Our analysis is based on a sample of 376 Italian university students who responded to the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS) and attended entrepreneurship education courses. We describe and implement a coding procedure that allows us to classify the entrepreneurship courses attended by the respondents into five different teaching models (Supply, Supply–Demand, Demand, Demand–Competence and Competence). We find that courses based on the Supply–Demand, Demand and Demand–Competence Models are associated with better entrepreneurial learning outcomes than those based on the Supply Model. Our findings contribute to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship education program evaluation and design

How You Teach Matters! An Exploratory Study on the Relationship between Teaching Models and Learning Outcomes in Entrepreneurship Education

Although entrepreneurship can be taught in different ways, entrepreneurship education impact studies generally fall short with regard to acknowledging the teaching models of the programs they assess. This severely limits our understanding of how entrepreneurship education actually works. To address this gap, this study describes and implements a procedure to identify the teaching models of entrepreneurship education courses and shows how different teaching models are associated with entrepreneurial learning outcomes. Our analysis is based on a sample of 376 Italian university students who responded to the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS) and attended entrepreneurship education courses. We describe and implement a coding procedure that allows us to classify the entrepreneurship courses attended by the respondents into five different teaching models (Supply, Supply–Demand, Demand, Demand–Competence and Competence). We find that courses based on the Supply–Demand, Demand and Demand–Competence Models are associated with better entrepreneurial learning outcomes than those based on the Supply Model. Our findings contribute to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship education program evaluation and design

Financing innovation : challenges, opportunities, and trends

The aim of this section is to offer a comprehensive review of research on the financing of innovation. After presenting the challenges associated with financing innovation from a theoretical point of view, the section synthetizes extant literature to show how these challenges constrain the process of raising funds and investing in innovation. The section then describes the role of business angels and venture capital funds, as well as public policy initiatives in support of these investors. Albeit these instruments have been traditionally conceptualized as remedies to these problems, the section also stresses their limitations and critical aspects. Finally, the section provides an overview of the most recent and emerging tools of financing innovation, such as crowd-funding. In particular, we adopt a business-law perspective to describe these instruments and illustrate the trade-off between the protection of investors and the facilitation of innovation, which challenges both scholars and policymakers. The section concludes with a synthetic research agenda with the aim to encourage future research on the functioning of these financial innovations

Founders imprinting and organizational learning: the case of scientists entrepreneurship

One important reason because innovative new firms (INVs) fail to market innovation is the lack of search breadth; through search breadth – interacting with different types of information sources – INVs have access to the combination of commercial and business knowledge required for commercializing innovations. Adopting the theoretical lens of imprinting we develop a set of hypotheses to explain when and how the involvement of scientists as founders of INVs help to overcome this challenge. We test and find support for our hypotheses on a representative sample of 220 INVs. Our results indicate that INVs founded by scientists search more broadly as compared to other INVs and that this difference becomes larger when the proportion of scientists among INV’s founders increases; however scientists’ contribution to INVs’ search breadth is weakened when the INV does not engage extensively in strategic planning and when it prioritizes non-monetary goals related to innovation and social outcomes rewarded in the scientific community. Our findings contribute to research on organizational learning, founders’ imprinting and scientists’ commercialization activities and allow to formulate managerial and policy implications

GUESSS National Report Italy 2018: Entrepreneurial intentions and behaviors of Italian University students

GUESSS (‘Global University Entrepreneurial Spirits Students Survey’) is an international research project aimed at tracking entrepreneurial intentions and activities of university students. In recent years, the publications based on GUESSS data in top entrepreneurship journals have rapidly grown, while the importance of the project in the academic community has increasingly been recognized. In Italy the survey has been coordinated by the Center for Young and Family Enterprise (CYFE) – University of Bergamo. This report describes data collected from the Italian sample, including students’ responses about entrepreneurial intentions, the number of active entrepreneurs and nascent entrepreneur as well as students’ socio-demographic background. The Italian survey collected 7,122 students’ responses, coming from 21 universities