Entrepreneurship Education: More Than Just an Adjustment to Management Education

Abstract

Professor Vesper is with the University of Washington, USA and W Ed McMullan and Dennis M. Ray are with the University of Calgary, Canada. At least half of the business schools in the United States and Canada now offer courses in entrepreneurship. In those schools the typical pattern is to offer one three- credit cours in the subject. Such a course ordinarily centres around preparation by students of a detailed plan of steps to be followed for creating a new business enterprise. Class activities usually include some lectures by entrepreneurs as well as the instructor; plus review of prior business plans by other entrepreneurs, often combined with case studies. A few schools have gone on to offer more than one course, possibly a second course in which those students who wish to do so can carry further forward their business plan. A still smaller number of schools, around a dozen, have enough different entrepreneurship courses to permit students to major in the subject. A next step, already being explored by two or three schools, would seem to be development of an entrepreneurship degree programme.