Abstract
Entrepreneurship education is a growing field of studies internationally, as a range of curricular and co-curricular programs have emerged in higher education institutions. Considering the multiple goals and motivations of both those supporting and running entrepreneurship programs, how do entrepreneurship educators define “success”? This study explores this question focusing on the Canadian province of Ontario. Ontario is a critical case for investigating entrepreneurship education as programs in the field have proliferated over the past decade. Findings show multiple co-existing views on student success that are far from being reconciled, and speak to broader debates over the goals of entrepreneurship education in the university.
Keywords
What Does Success Look Like for Entrepreneurship Education?
Entrepreneurship has been taught at universities in North America for over a century. Starting in the American public land-grant universities, self-employed farmers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century learned about business and new technologies. Dedicated entrepreneurship courses for business students emerged in the mid-twentieth century (Katz, 2003). However, over the past three decades a series of social and economic drivers has brought entrepreneurship education to the forefront of the agendas of higher education institutions. In Canada, some universities have offered entrepreneurship education since the 1970s, but the number of university entrepreneurship courses grew from 72 in 1979 to 446 by 2008 (Menzies, 2009). According to a survey of business school deans and directors of entrepreneurship centres conducted by Industry Canada (2010) at around that time, half of universities and colleges surveyed aim to foster entrepreneurial behaviours, skills and mindsets, while 23% have an institution-wide strategy to deliver entrepreneurship education. Since then, entrepreneurship learning opportunities have disseminated in the curriculum and extra-curricular activities of colleges and universities (Sá & Kretz, 2015).
Entrepreneurship education provides an interesting context for examining field-specific ideas about student success. Despite the diffusion of entrepreneurship education, there is no clear consensus in the literature on what constitutes success in this field (Roberts, Hoy, Katz & Neck, 2014). Many evaluations of entrepreneurship education programs examine economic and social-psychological outcomes (Weber, 2012). Economic measures may include the number of businesses students start during or after their programs, revenue generation and profitability, and the number of jobs created (Carter & Collinson, 1999; Charney, Libecap & Center, 2000; McMullan, Chrisman & Vesper, 2001). At the individual level, student self-reported inclination to establish a firm, measures of innovative behaviour, and improved competencies in a variety of skills tied to entrepreneurship have been used to ascertain success (Souitaris, Zerbinati & Al-Laham, 2007; European Commission, 2012; Ruhle, Mühlbauer, Grünhagen & Rothenstein, 2010; De Faoite, Henry, Johnston & van der Sijde, 2003; Roberts et al., 2014). As the field disseminates away from business schools, expansive and broad interpretations have also become common as in fostering student creativity, initiative, innovativeness, and self-reliance (Sá & Kretz, 2015).
This paper draws on research conducted in the province of Ontario in Canada to identify the goals entrepreneurship education programs prioritize and how they define success. This is a rapidly evolving landscape; entrepreneurship education as programs have proliferated over the past decade (Sá, Kretz, & Sigurdson 2014), making Ontario a critical case for investigating this field. The diffusion in entrepreneurship programming in Ontario has occurred as provincial policies and initiatives encouraged the growth of entrepreneurial education in higher education. Programs such as Campus-Linked Accelerators (
The Nature of Entrepreneurship Education
The question of whether entrepreneurs are born or taught has been asked for as long as universities and colleges have taught the subject, and has not yet gone away (Fayolle & Gailly, 2008). Those who question the possibility of teaching entrepreneurship to students espouse the idea that individuals who become entrepreneurs have distinctive personality traits and predispositions to engage in venture creation. Proponents of entrepreneurship education, on the other hand, argue that critical knowledge, skills, and dispositions can and should be taught. The argument is that students need to acquire and integrate knowledge, skills, and practical experiences to become prepared to think and act like an entrepreneur.
Yet, there are different views on the nature of entrepreneurship education as a field of study, including the essential knowledge, competencies, or skills that entrepreneur students need to learn. On one hand, Katz (2008) sees convergence around topics included in entrepreneurship courses in the US, which are thematically organized around the entrepreneurial process rather than business disciplines. Courses are designed around topics such as identifying opportunities, planning the new venture, and securing financing. Furthermore, extra-curricular activities such as business plan competitions provide students with learn-by-doing opportunities to acquire these skills. On the other hand, the academic field of entrepreneurship does not follow widely shared curricular models, and universities organize degree and non-degree programs in the field in diverse ways (Sá & Kretz, 2015). Some scholars claim that entrepreneurship education is too heterogeneous and that the field lacks consensus on what should be taught (Henry, Hill & Leitch, 2005; Solomon, 2007).
More fundamentally, the purpose of entrepreneurship education continues to be debated. Scholars differentiate between education about entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship as a phenomenon) and education for entrepreneurship (learning how to become an entrepreneur) (Laukkanen, 2000). Some entrepreneurship educators propose that students should not learn about entrepreneurship, but rather how to do it through pedagogical approaches that emphasize experiential learning (Rasmussen and Sorheim, 2006). This perspective rests on the belief that the purpose of the field is to train prospective entrepreneurs (Fayolle, Gailly & Lassas-Clerc, 2006; Packham, Jones, Miller, Pickernall & Thomas, 2010). Others center the learning of knowledge and skills that may be applied in variegated contexts as the key contribution of entrepreneurship education (Oosterbeek, van Praag & Ijsselstein, 2010; von Graevenitz, Harhoff, & Weber, 2010). This view is reflected in the expansion of entrepreneurship education into several areas beyond business creation, including social entrepreneurship and other applications in public services and the arts.
Nonetheless, conceptions of entrepreneurship vary substantially among those devoted to entrepreneurship education. The field continues to struggle with fundamental questions about its goals, purpose, and boundaries (Fayolle, 2013; Kuratko & Morris, 2018). Conceptualizations of the very idea of entrepreneurship vary (Gartner, 1990), and there is little agreement on what aspiring entrepreneurs must learn (Solomon, 2007). Is entrepreneurship education about providing students with knowledge and skills that are applicable to a wide range of contexts and occupations, or it is about nurturing entrepreneurs? Are co-curricular entrepreneurship programs supposed to support student learning and development, or help them create ventures? Should entrepreneurship programs be housed within business schools in a center or program, or should it be distributed across multiple faculties and departments? Lack of consensus around these questions underpins the uncertainty about how best to organize entrepreneurship programs in universities (Roberts, Hoy, Katz & Neck, 2014).
Although entrepreneurship courses and programs are typically found within business schools, entrepreneurship education straddles the boundaries of other disciplines. Accommodation of the field in the academic structure does not follow a widely shared organizational arrangement, and colleges and universities display different configurations (Sá and Kretz, 2015). Moreover, specializations such as social entrepreneurship and arts entrepreneurship push the field’s boundaries into other disciplinary domains.
The Study
This paper draws on data collected for a larger study carried out in 2014 in Ontario. The first phase of this study involved collecting program-level data from all provincially funded universities (N=20) and colleges (N=24) in Ontario. Institutional program and course catalogues were collected as a way to identify existing entrepreneurship education offerings, and follow up contacts were made to pursue additional information or clarification. The focus of the study was on continuing entrepreneurship programs aimed at college and university students. Hence, some entrepreneurship-related programming that was episodic or not aimed at registered undergraduate or graduate students was excluded, including: continuing education and distance education courses, non-recurring and non-permanent events and programs, and student clubs or events by student clubs. Once all entrepreneurship education offerings were identified, program-related documentation was gathered containing intended goals, objectives, and desired outcomes, as well as the contact information of program directors.
The second phase of the study comprehended a web-based survey designed to gather information from entrepreneurship program directors. The questionnaire included questions about program goals and how directors defined, assessed, and measured success. The survey instrument was pilot tested with three university and college volunteers prior to implementation. Potential respondents (program directors) were identified through phase one as described above. The survey was sent to 91 program directors, 40 of which completed the questionnaire. These respondents reported on 54 distinctive entrepreneurship education programs or courses at 13 universities and 10 colleges. The survey asked questions about the profile of the students enrolled in the programs, frameworks and procedures for program evaluation, the indicators used to evaluate programs, among other questions.
Findings
Entrepreneurship Education in Ontario
There has been an expansion and diversification of entrepreneurship-related offerings in Ontario university and colleges, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Those offerings include entrepreneurship majors, minors, concentrations, options, foci and specializations. For those not pursuing a degree, diplomas, certificates and other credentials are offered. Universities offer a variety of entrepreneurship specializations. At the undergraduate level, 16 programs were offered across 13 universities, whether as a minor, major, concentration, area of emphasis, certificate or option. At the graduate level, there were 16 entrepreneurship specialization programs across 10 universities. Most college entrepreneurship courses are offered in diploma programs. Both classroom- and experiential learning models are available in a variety of venues, from college campuses in relatively remote communities to universities in the province’s densest cities.
Entrepreneurship education programs are most commonly found in business schools and engineering faculties. However, a wide range of campus environments beyond those two fields host curricular and extra-curricular activities. Entrepreneurial mentoring programs, business incubators and accelerators are open to students from a range of disciplines and educational levels. Those units are sometimes hosted in entrepreneurship centres.
In total, 72 undergraduate entrepreneurship courses and 42 graduate courses were identified in Ontario’s universities, and a total of 174 courses were identified among the colleges. The three most popular course topics were introduction/principles of entrepreneurship, new venture creation/development, and entrepreneurship strategy. As the titles suggests, the introduction to entrepreneurship courses provide an overview of entrepreneurial attitudes, behaviours, and processes. New venture creation and development courses tend to focus on the processes of business entry and expansion, while entrepreneurship strategy courses center on developing entrepreneurial skills, such as opportunity recognition and creativity. Technological entrepreneurship and finance for entrepreneurs are popular course topics at the graduate level. The former deal with technology-based business ventures, and the latter include such subjects as venture capital, fundraising and financial management.
Most entrepreneurship courses at the undergraduate level are offered at business schools, although engineering faculties also offer a sizable number of courses. Other faculties offering entrepreneurship courses include an arts and culture management program, a faculty of design, a faculty of science and a computer science department. Graduate entrepreneurship courses are almost equally divided between engineering and business faculties, although engineering faculties offered slightly more courses.
Finally, 75 extracurricular entrepreneurship activities were identified in colleges and universities. Seventeen of those programs are offered by 8 colleges and 58 programs are available in 13 universities. These extracurricular entrepreneurship programs take on a variety of forms, including incubators, accelerators, competitions, co-ops, mentorship initiatives, among others. As discussed above, many in the field believe that experiential learning, of the kind provided by these extracurricular programs, is central to the entrepreneurship educational process (Kuratko 2005; Kretz & Sá, 2015). They allow students to work through entrepreneurial activities such as ideation and problem-solving, work in teams, and interact with stakeholders. Indeed, the support to extracurricular entrepreneurship programming in Ontario is grounded in the belief that would-be entrepreneurs benefit from, and perhaps even require, experiential learning.
Defining and Evaluating Success
In this context, is the success of students tied to earning academic credentials, completing extracurricular requirements, and successfully graduating? Or is it primarily about engaging in entrepreneurial activity as a start-up founder? Programs across the province’s colleges and universities provide different answers to these questions, as their goals and definitions of success vary. These disparate perspectives are articulated in the relative importance program directors attribute to the goals of their programs and the criteria they employ to determine success.
Entrepreneurship educators afford as much weight to academic study as to practical skills, experiential learning, and the acculturation of students to the field (Table 1). As might be expected for curricular programming such as for-credit courses and programs leading to academic credentials, imparting knowledge and skills related to entrepreneurship was a highly important program goal. For extracurricular programs, teaching entrepreneurship knowledge and skills remained relatively important, but the development of entrepreneurial attitudes and outlooks was most important on average, along with the provision of practical experience and networking.
Note: Respondents were asked their views about the importance of the various goals of the entrepreneurship education programs under their direction. They were asked to rate the importance of ten goals using a four-point scale. Response options included: very important; important; somewhat important; and not at all important. Responses were scored 3 for very important, 2 for important, 1 for somewhat important, and 0 for those who felt the goal was not important at all.
In addition to teaching entrepreneurship concepts and skills, instilling entrepreneurial attitudes, providing hands-on experience with entrepreneurship, and supporting them create start-ups were prioritized. Many courses indicate that helping students write business plan is an “important” program goal, as described in table 2, although this practice is contested as to its utility in relation to the entrepreneurial process (Brinckmann, Grichnik and Kapsa, 2010). Notably, while still rating it as important, the relative emphasis on business plans was much lower among extra-curricular programs.
Examination of the relative importance of the different goals for curricular and extracurricular programs reveals that the latter are, expectedly, most likely to target creating companies and providing students with “real world” experience in entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, both curricular and extra-curricular program directors believe that “imparting entrepreneurship skills and knowledge” and “engendering entrepreneurial attitudes and culture” are highly important priorities.
When asked to indicate how they evaluate success, program directors listed multiple ideas encompassing learning, attitudinal, economic, and programmatic aspects (Figure 1). Most directors employed participant satisfaction to evaluate their programs, whether those were curricular or extra-curricular. Differences emerge about those kinds of programs in terms of the student outcomes they value the most. Curricular program directors expectedly emphasized the achievement of learning outcomes as a key criterion; extracurricular programs, on the other hand, placed much higher emphasis on venture creation and economic measures such as job generation, local economic impact, and company equity creation. Those criteria are often related to the expectations of policy makers and donors, who play an important role in supporting college and university-based programs (Sá & Kretz, 2015).
How program evaluate success
The goal of nurturing entrepreneurs, which is common among entrepreneurship educators, is considered very important as described above, but not commonly assessed as an indicator of success. This would seem to pose a paradox, but programs may take venture creation as evidence of a realized entrepreneurial outlook, an indicator used by about 70% of extracurricular programs. In addition, this might also be explained by the challenge of measuring attitudes and propensities for entrepreneurial behaviour, particularly in the short-term.
In addition to asking respondents to identify the criteria used for evaluation, respondents were asked to rate the importance of each criterion. Evident in Table 2 is that learning outcomes take precedence as the most important evaluation criterion for curricular programs, though it is substantially less important for extracurricular programs. For extracurricular programming, the following criteria are all accorded greater importance than learning outcomes: participant satisfaction, venture creation, attitudinal outcomes, job creation, and economic impact on the local community. The importance afforded to learning outcomes, attitudinal outcomes and participant satisfaction for curricular programs and the more dispersed importance across all criteria for extra-curricular programs are also noteworthy.
Note: Respondents were asked to rate the importance of the evaluation criteria using a fourpoint scale. Response options included: very important; important; somewhat important; and not at all important. Responses were scored 3 for very important, 2 for important, 1 for somewhat important, and 0 for those who felt the goal was not important at all.
Entrepreneurship education in Ontario is very diverse, and this is reflected in the range of goals and definitions of success that programs embrace. This diversity is consistent with the international experience, as the field has evolved organically, based on variegated educational models (Torrance et al., 2013; Matlay, 2006). Entrepreneurship educators in Ontario bring the different orientations of the field to their campuses: some frame success as related to venture creation and economic impact, while others emphasize theoretical and practical learning. Whatever the assumptions guiding entrepreneurship educators, several questions remain about how success is defined and how that relates to what programs seek students to accomplish.
Our findings above document the palate of criteria that are employed to gauge success. However, it is not clear how programs interpret—or should interpret—the outcomes they value. For instance, if venture creation is regarded as an important indicator of success, does a decline in entrepreneurial intention among students mean that the program and students themselves have not succeeded? The answer to that question is far from obvious. Courses introducing entrepreneurship may serve an important “cooling off” function in allowing students to recognize the challenges of entrepreneurship while raising their awareness of their ability, skills, resources, and desire to start a business. Students may have experience positive learning outcomes from such courses even if the result is a decline in their likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs (von Graevenitz, Harhoff, & Weber, 2010). The same might be said of extra-curricular programs that allow students to consider ideas for new ventures and access mentors; helping students make informed decisions about creating a business is a different form of success than tallying the total number of start-ups generated.
Similarly, a program whose students create a number of start-up companies before or shortly after graduation may view regard that outcome as evidence of their success—as many programs indeed do. However, as start-up failure rates are particularly high, what if a large fraction of those ventures shut down within a year or two? Should those students still be considered successful? Are programs that do not account for longer-term outcomes incurring in error by relying on short-term metrics? Arguably, there is no clear consensus on how to resolve these questions (Torrance et al., 2013). While this may be in part a methodological issue, addressing these problems requires conceptual elaboration on what constitutes a positive outcome if success is defined as venture creation.
Another usual aspiration among entrepreneurship educators is to impart an entrepreneurial mindset among students, which is often believed to lead to multiple benefits for students and society. Indeed, recent research has found that entrepreneurship programs in Canada promote themselves to students as helping them develop an entrepreneurial mindset (Pizarro Millian and Gurrisi, 2017). However, a minority of the respondents in this study indicated that they assess their success by attempting to capture the development of students’ mindset. Indeed, little research has considered entrepreneurial mindset a key outcome of entrepreneurship education (Nabi et al., 2017). Furthermore, it is not clear what the appropriate time-frame should be for ascertaining the success of entrepreneurship education in instilling such attitudes (Pittaway et al., 2009). For instance, international surveys of university students show sometimes large variations in entrepreneurial intentions shortly after graduation and five years later (Sieger, Fueglistaller and Zellweger, 2016). Such variation suggests the need for caution in interpreting course and program-led assessments carried out immediately after the educational experience.
Hence, greater attention is needed to building or further elaborating the rationales guiding intended program goals and outcomes. A recent meta-analysis of the empirical research on the effects of entrepreneurship education shows that evaluation in the field tends to be overly focused on short-term and subjective outcome measures (Nabi et al., 2017). Moreover, evaluation research tends to ignore the psychological and emotional impacts of entrepreneurship education, including aspects that programs tend to consider important such as entrepreneurial mindset. Beyond the dominant stance on start-up founding as a key indicator of success, there are other outcomes of entrepreneurship education such as intrapreneurship and social entrepreneurship that are often invoked as valuable and desirable. Indeed, some argue that they need to be taken up more broadly as desired outcomes (Jones and Matlay, 2011).
This study finds similar patterns to those reported in the literature: entrepreneurship education happens in multiple venues, involving single courses, credentials, and diverse extra-curricular programs (Torrance et al., 2013; Matlay, 2006). The dissemination of entrepreneurship education programs beyond business schools has involved faculty and students with diverse academic backgrounds and professional orientations in entrepreneurship teaching and learning. Faculty and students come to entrepreneurship programs from multiple backgrounds, and they have diverse objectives, aspirations, and opportunities available to them. This heterogeneity is arguably a strength of the field, and defies attempts at standardizing teaching practices and educational models (Jones and Matlay, 2011).
In this context, greater attention at conceptualizing what entrepreneurship education programs construe is success is needed. Colleges and universities are expected to contribute to local economic development and innovation, and entrepreneurship education programs are all too often viewed instrumentally as means towards those ends. It is common for campus leaders to harbor unrealistic expectations about what entrepreneurship programs on campus can deliver in terms of economic impact (Sá and Kretz, 2015). Well defined expectations based on clearly defined visions of success would help minimize such issues, and facilitate the coordination and articulation of established and emergent models of entrepreneurship education.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This research has been funded by the Government of Ontario. I would like to thank all individuals who took the time to participate in the study, making this research possible. Any errors remain solely mine.