The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education in Higher Education: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Using a teaching model framework, we systematically review empirical evidence on the impact of entrepreneurship education (EE) in higher education on a range of entrepreneurial outcomes, analyzing 159 published articles from 2004 to 2016. The teaching model framework allows us for the first time to start rigorously examining relationships between pedagogical methods and specific outcomes. Reconfirming past reviews and meta-analyses, we find that EE impact research still predominantly focuses on short-term and subjective outcome measures and tends to severely underdescribe the actual pedagogies being tested. Moreover, we use our review to provide an up-to-date and empirically rooted call for less obvious, yet greatly promising, new or underemphasized directions for future research on the impact of university-based entrepreneurship education. This includes, for example, the use of novel impact indicators related to emotion and mind-set, focus on the impact indicators related to the intention-to-behavior transition, and exploring the reasons for some contradictory findings in impact studies including person-, context-, and pedagogical model-specific moderator

Entrepreneurial competencies and the performance of informal SMEs: the contingent role of business environment

This study examined entrepreneurial competencies as a viable pathway for improving the innovative performance of SMEs in Nigeria's informal sector and the contingent roles of the business environment. A survey research design was used to gather data from 296 entrepreneurs who operate informal SMEs in Nigeria. Based on the findings from the SEM-PLS multivariate analysis, the study concluded that entrepreneurial competencies, especially organising, conceptual, learning, strategic, opportunity and risk-taking competencies, are essential for achieving higher innovation performance. The study also reveals that entrepreneurial competencies are useful towards mitigating environmental pressures resulting from operational turbulence and erratic policy changes, as the firm drives towards improving innovation outputs. As such, the entrepreneurship environment is becoming more endogenous as entrepreneurs, through their entrepreneurial competencies, have started to gain control over it. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by highlighting the most essential competencies alongside the relevant contingencies. By doing that, this study offers a practical guide on priority competence area that entrepreneurship stakeholders, including entrepreneurs and policymakers, should consider for investment