Abstract
Entrepreneurship has long been proposed as an answer to a range of economic and social problems, from recovery following the financial crisis to unemployment to social exclusion. However, policies in support of these objectives have received widespread criticism, for example, in terms of their lack of integration and coordination (see, for example, Huggins and Williams, 2009). Systemic entrepreneurship seeks to overcome these problems by promoting entrepreneurship in different ways, to overcome socioeconomic challenges by eschewing ‘unproductive’ forms of entrepreneurship in favour of ‘socially productive entrepreneurial activities that go beyond the local level’ (Sautet, 2013: 393). Systemic Entrepreneurship: Contemporary Issues and Case Studies aims to contribute to this emerging area by providing an international perspective on the creation of sustainable, impactful entrepreneurship.
The book contains four chapters, each of which includes brief articles that explore particular issues and that form the bulk of the book’s content, framed and developed by the editors. The first chapter provides an overview of systemic entrepreneurship and raises the need to question underlying assumptions, suggesting a systemic approach as holistic and heuristic and beyond the short-termism created by politicised motivations. The article included in this initial chapter by Duckett seeks to problematise the contemporary model of the business school, suggesting an alternative in terms of educating for sustainability, humanity and life, together with a greater emphasis on employability.
The choice of focus on business schools in Chapter 1 reflects a general focus on entrepreneurship education throughout the book. Chapter 2 provides an explicit engagement with the topic and, with the inclusion of four articles, it forms the majority of the book and seeks to improve the evidence base for the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education with examples from Africa. The first article, by Venter, Cullen and Hamadou, proposes to measure the influence of student happiness on entrepreneurial intention in South Africa, arguing for the importance of increasing levels of entrepreneurship as a way to address inequality, poverty and crime. The second article, by Newbery, proposes a model to look at the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention and, in turn, on regional development in Nigeria, suggesting that necessity entrepreneurs and ‘copy cat’ businesses will provide only local effects and not the regional development required.
The third article, by Lockyer, is particularly interesting and focuses on the Africanisation of education in Africa in a post-colonial opposition to Western traditions. Alternative cultural approaches to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education are to be welcomed, for example, in terms of a greater focus on communalism (Mallett and Wapshott, 2015). The article compares examples of higher education in Europe (the idea of the entrepreneurial university) and Africa (with a specific focus on South Africa). Lockyer identifies the difficulties of balancing Africanisation and a perceived need to increase entrepreneurial intention and enterprise culture. Whether this is because of an inherent Western characterisation of enterprise culture in its underlying assumptions is not explored but the article raises some interesting challenges.
The fourth article on entrepreneurship education, by Hill and Miles, focuses on engineering students and debates surrounding entrepreneurship and ‘humanitarian engineering’. This article conceives of systemic entrepreneurship as ‘applying the values and benefits of entrepreneurial characteristics upon society that looks to go further than simply the local community’ (p. 63) and therefore of value for engineers engaged in international development projects. Participants in the study were UK university students who completed a survey on their business experience together with interviews about their experiences of humanitarian engineering in Africa, the results suggesting a correlation between humanitarian engineering and entrepreneurial individuals.
The editors claim entrepreneurship education as a ‘global phenomenon’ (p. 77), and this selection of articles focused on Africa provides some interesting insights into a bigger picture on entrepreneurship education. However, there is a limited impact on the evidence base because three of the articles propose models with no empirical material and the fourth is focused on education in the United Kingdom, albeit in relation to students working in Africa. Nonetheless, these articles suggest some interesting ways forwards for the literature.
Chapter 3 focuses on entrepreneurship support in terms of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) treated as an example of entrepreneurial ecosystems. It features an article by Preedy that evaluates extra-curricula support in a UK HEI, valuably highlighting the range of activities that, often unrecognised, happen outside of formal education provision (e.g. advice, competitions for funding, facilities and networking opportunities). In Chapter 4, the editors then conclude the book by offering recommendations for how to support systemic entrepreneurship, providing a detailed example from their work in their own HEI. They suggest a need for a coordinated focus on regionally relevant narratives, the entrepreneurial ecosystem, policy formulation, innovation and institution-specific activities. It is in this way that HEIs might support the diffusion of entrepreneurial gains beyond the local to achieve the socioeconomic benefits proposed.
This is an interesting book with some valuable aims. However, while HEIs could potentially play an important role in the development of systemic entrepreneurship, the exclusive focus on HEIs and entrepreneurship education limits the scope of the book. For those readers interested in this area, the focus provides some interesting insights and case studies, but for those seeking a wider engagement with the topic of systemic entrepreneurship, the contribution of the book is limited. Furthermore, it is not always clear how entrepreneurship education will produce the outcomes claimed. The proposals around increased entrepreneurial intention are clearly plausible but the details on why entrepreneurship promotion and support will be more effective considered as systemic and how it will be better equipped to overcome inequality, poverty, crime, regional development and other socioeconomic challenges is left unclear. A systemic approach is a logical step forwards but remains under-developed in this book.