Entrepreneurship education at the crossroads: challenging taken-for-granted assumptions and opening new perspectives

Loi, M.;Fayolle, A.;van Gelderen, M.;Riot, E.;Refai, D.;Higgins, D.;Haloub, R.;Salusse, M. A. Y.;Lamy, E.;Verzat, C.;Cavarretta, F.

2021-01-01

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Abstract

This work presents a synthesis of a debate regarding taken-for-granted assumptions and challenges in entrepreneurship education, matured after a developmental workshop organized to increase the research salience of the field. From the five contributions selected, three challenges emerge. The first is recognizing that participants’ representations about entrepreneurship play a crucial role in defining goals and impact of entrepreneurship education; second, integrating new perspectives of conceiving entrepreneurship into the current models of teaching entrepreneurship; and, lastly, facilitating the integration of entrepreneurship knowledge into practice. These challenges opened up to a conception of entrepreneurship education as a dynamic concept reflecting personal values, societal changes, and cultural differences. As a result, learning places of entrepreneurship education promotes exploration and not adaptation to existing schemes, where personal models for practicing entrepreneurship have room to emerge. Defining knowledge priorities, instead of targeting knowledge exhaustiveness, becomes of greatest importance to make entrepreneurship education‘s impact more relevant.