Entrepreneurial education in the metaverse: Challenges and prospects for business schools

Abstract

This paper reexamines the debate on technological disruptive innovation and its tendency to fail, focusing on entrepreneurial education (EE). It explores the emergence of new EE formats, particularly training programs using the metaverse. The research question is: “How are technological disruptive innovations in EE developed and why do most of them fail?”. For that purpose, we mobilize the EE literature as well as the state of the art on innovation processes among business schools, considered to be one of the main vehicles of EE. This state of the art provides a framework for interpreting an ethnographic study on the trajectory of an abandoned EE program initially planned for implementation in the metaverse. Although such initiatives may receive institutional support, they often provoke “crises of stimulation” among faculty (acting as EE innovators), which escalate into “crises of manipulation,” ultimately leading to the project's cessation. The paper contributes to the EE field by examining why metaverse-based EE faces high failure rates and may be difficult to develop within business schools. It also adds to metaverse literature by showing how its applications follow similar failure patterns as other disruptive innovations.