Volume 4, Issue 1 - Special Issue – Entrepreneurship Education across Campus, Guest Editors: Frank Hoy, Joseph Roberts, Jereme Katz, and Heidi Neck

Entrepreneurship Education has seen rapid growth in the 21 st century. As an academic discipline, entrepreneurship has spread its wings, escaped business schools and nested within non-business disciplines in academia. The focus of this Entrepreneurship Research Journal Special Issue, “Cross Campus Entrepreneurship Education” is to trace the development of this occurrence. In this overarching article describing the special issue, we briefly introduce some of the early stimulants of entrepreneurship education. This includes providing historical perspectives on how entrepreneurship became a global phenomenon. The rapid growth is continuing as entrepreneurship education becomes infused in disciplines such as arts, sciences, engineering, humanities, technology and social sciences. We examine how entrepreneurship curricula and campus ecosystems for entrepreneurship education have evolved. We draw from articles selected for this special issue of Entrepreneurship Research Journal to consider why and how this phenomenon is happening. This includes identifying both facilitators and obstacles associated with the proliferation of entrepreneurship education. Cross Campus Entrepreneurship Education prototypes utilized by The Coleman Foundation Faculty Fellows Program, The Kern Engineering Entrepreneurship Network and The Kauffman Campus Initiative are explained. The Fellows Program is presented as a potential testing ground for establishing norms for infusing entrepreneurship across non-business disciplines and assessing effectiveness of such initiatives. The authors of the articles published in this special issue demonstrate that approaches to educating students in multiple majors with entrepreneurship concepts have been themselves entrepreneurial. Universities with cross-campus programs have been creative, innovative and even disruptive. We give particular attention to challenges associated with assessing the effectiveness of the initiatives. It is evident that effective outcomes assessment will be critical in the future to ensure that campus-wide educational efforts do not become diluted and dysfunctional. There are numerous difficulties associated with such assessments, not the least of which may be the time lag that can be expected between instruction and fruition. Nevertheless, experiments in assessments that are already underway are explained. Multiple stakeholders, including government and academic institutions as well as students and faculty, are active in promoting and evaluating entrepreneurship programs. Research implications are explored and future research challenges within cross campus entrepreneurship education are uncovered.

This article provides a history of the development of cross campus entrepreneurship education (CCEE) in the United States and the European Union. Three drivers of CCEE were identified – Entrepreneurial Occupation, Entrepreneurial Employment and 10 Entrepreneurial Universities. Five models for CCEE efforts were also identified: focused (single-discipline), collaborative (two or more disciplines coordinating), magnet (bringing a campus to a central place), radiant (distributing resources across a campus) and mixed. CCEE efforts in the USA and EU initially stemmed from individual actions, with further US growth due to the involvement of private foundations, while in Europe, the individual actors’ efforts gave way to EU-wide policies promoting CCEE for all higher educational institutions as part of the Oslo Agenda. These efforts are described and contrasted. Research topics related to the different approaches and issues of CCEE are identified.

University-wide entrepreneurship is introduced as a logical consequence of the rapid development of entrepreneurship in post-secondary institutions across the globe. While sometimes approached simply as a redefinition of the boundaries for an entrepreneurship program on college campuses, in this article we conceptualize university-wide entrepreneurship as a transformational, multi-dimensional force that enables universities to be more innovative, risk-taking and proactive. The underlying nature of this conceptualization is explored together with reasons for the emergence of entrepreneurship across campuses. Ways in which entrepreneurship is manifested within a university are investigated, key stakeholders for the university-wide approach are identified, and obstacles to implementation of these initiatives are specified. Five dimensions of university-wide entrepreneurship are introduced: inter-disciplinary research, a curriculum and degree programs, co-curricular programming, community engagement, and university operations. An integrative model is proposed of key elements that contribute to a climate where successful university-wide efforts can be pursued. Included here are an academic champion, a consistent definition, a clear statement of purpose, a governance structure, supporting infrastructure, a curricular model, co-curricular programming, a resource model, incentives, proactive publicity, and targeted outcomes and metrics. Alternative approaches to program governance are reviewed, including those centered within and outside of a business school. Implications are drawn for the ongoing development of the university-wide concept.

To date, there is little consensus about which types of educational methods, approaches, and support systems best facilitate entrepreneurial learning. By looking at entrepreneurship education through a socio-cognitive lens, this article presents a theory-based practical model that characterizes entrepreneurship education as a dynamic field of inquiry that considers the triadic reciprocal relationship of personal, behavioral and environmental factors of entrepreneurial learning. Based on this dynamic model and understanding of entrepreneurship education, action research is proposed as a new way of inquiry in order to facilitate the continuous improvement and evolution of educational methods and pedagogies across entrepreneurship programs in both academic and non-academic learning environments across the campus.

Entrepreneurship education has revolutionized all aspects of business. Entrepreneurship education has progressed from programs housed only in business schools to cross-disciplinary programs in departments across college and university campuses in the past 10 years. This blended approach that encompasses various disciplines with entrepreneurship through combined learning objectives focuses on application. However, the measurement of entrepreneurial propensity in students across the curriculum, let alone in traditional Entrepreneurship programs, is sorely needed. Learning assessment is lacking. We propose and test a measure of entrepreneurial propensity across the curriculum in a successful cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship program at a public state university. Six of the nine entrepreneurship constructs showed statistically significant gains from pre- to post-test scores. Implications for further research and application are discussed.

This article expands on a paper originally presented at the annual conference of USASBE in 2013. 1 It is a narrative qualitative study of four university-based arts venture incubators, one of which is headed by the author. Its purpose is to describe in narrative form the goals of such programs and the means by which university-based arts venture incubators measure their success. There is scant research on small business incubator evaluation and even less on arts venture incubator evaluation. The article looks at four university-based arts venture incubators to identify key issues of evaluation and similarities and differences across program types.

The global recession of 2008 has created lingering economic uncertainty and the necessity for innovative thinking and action. Workforce development, with its focus on massification and replication needs to incorporate entrepreneurial innovation and development to scale while disruptive innovation provides the stimulus that animates and drives the model. Education at the university level, entrepreneurship education in particular, needs to examine both new models and new types of students, because acting entrepreneurially is not just for entrepreneurs but for everybody. The model presented in this commentary is an attempt to focus on the processes and linkages between the various “actors” that define the disparate relationships and opportunities described in this commentary. Historically, entrepreneurship and workforce development have been viewed as separate, often conflicting priorities, frequently competing for scarce resources in the landscape of economic development. Although both entrepreneurship and workforce development bring resources and add value to the community economy and share common roots in education and training, there has been little current research that examines how they can be leveraged together to provide new models for economic development and innovation that accelerate growth, while providing for a vibrant economic future for our communities and nation via well-educated, nascent entrepreneurs.