Entrepreneurship
Content
Entrepreneurship Education
T
HIS CHAPTER PAYS SPECIFIC ATTENTION to the growth and cross-disciplinary expansion of entrepreneurship education. Although entrepreneurship has been proposed to be an emergent stand-alone field of study (see Shane and Venkataraman, 2000), we highlight entrepreneurship education as a thread that has increasingly become woven throughout the disciplinary fabric of higher education. First, we briefly describe the relatively recent emergence and growth of entrepreneurship education. Then we summarize and discuss the likely implications of the expansion of entrepreneurship education across nonbusiness fields of study. Throughout this chapter we explore the links of entrepreneurship education to the new economy’s influence on curriculum and instruction and its permeating effects across all academic disciplines and fields of study. The underlying theme of this chapter is that students are not passive in contemporary market-oriented environments but exhibit the agency to engage in entrepreneurship to achieve their individual social and economic goals.
The Emergence and Expansion of Entrepreneurship Education
Entrepreneurship education first emerged in 1947 with Harvard University’s offering the first college-level entrepreneurship course (Katz, 2003). Just over fifty years later, in 2001, data from the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership indicated that enrollments in entrepreneurship courses were as high as fifteen hundred students per semester at a single institution (Safranski, Entrepreneurial Domains 63
2004). In Canada, entrepreneurship education in colleges and universities has grown in terms of course offerings over the last twenty years at rates of 444 percent at the undergraduate level and 232 percent at the graduate level (Menzie, 2004). Likewise, entrepreneurship education has become a relatively common course of study in Europe (Bell, Callaghan, Demick, and Scharf, 2004; Dana, 1992; Garavan and O’Cinneide, 1994; Hytti and O’Gorman, 2004; Jack and Anderson, 1999) and Australia (Jones and English, 2004; Peterman and Kennedy, 2003). Kuratko (2005) attributed the rapid growth of entrepreneurship education to the equally remarkable growth of the entrepreneurial sector of the private economy. Accordingly, the emergence and establishment of entrepreneurship as a field of study has been argued to be at least partially the result of a private market need for trained entrepreneurs. The emergence and establishment of entrepreneurship education has occurred in the academic capitalist knowledge and learning regime (Mars, 2006). Finkle, Kuratko, and Goldsby (2006) described the expansion of entrepreneurship education as a phenomenon at least partially attributable to institutional strategies for seeking new opportunities for capitalizing on external revenue streams. For instance, outside constituencies and would-be benefactors have made the creation of entrepreneurship education centers a contingency of funding support (Finkle and Deeds, 2001). In other circumstances, intermediating organizations (see Metcalfe, 2004) have driven the creation and expansion of entrepreneurship centers in higher education institutions. For instance, nonprofit organizations such as the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Coleman Foundation in the United States and the John Dobson Foundation in Canada have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the efforts to establish and grow entrepreneurship education across higher education. In a 2004 survey of endowed positions in entrepreneurship and closely related fields, Katz (2004) indicated the number of such endowments grew worldwide from 271 in 1999 to 563 in 2003. In the same report, Katz disaggregated this figure to include only endowed entrepreneurship chairs in the United States. This disaggregation revealed a 71 percent growth rate, with the number of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship-related chairs increasing from 237 in 1999 to 406 in 2003. In short, the growth of entrepreneurship education can be argued to be a trend that has been subsidized 64
by private interests and a representation of the resource dependency and neoliberal market structures described by Slaughter and Rhoades (2004). Despite its rapid growth, entrepreneurship education continues to be a source of skepticism in terms of academic legitimacy (Kuratko, 2005). This skepticism originates primarily in the academy and has resulted in a shortage of faculty who are interested in and qualified to teach and conduct research in the area of entrepreneurship (Finkle and Deeds, 2001). This deficiency is further compounded by the reluctance of junior faculty to engage in entrepreneurshiprelated work as a result of the concern that such activities will negatively affect decisions about tenure and promotion (Kuratko, 2005; Mars, 2007). In response, scholars have actively initiated efforts to both legitimize and advance entrepreneurship research. One growth indicator of entrepreneurship scholarship is the establishment of at least forty-four English-language refereed journals specific to research in entrepreneurship or the development of small businesses (Katz, 2003). In addition, scholars have worked to develop a more theoretically and conceptually sound framework for conducting entrepreneurship that combines principles and fundamentals from both the social sciences and management fields (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). Further, to fill a growing number of endowed chairs in entrepreneurship and the need for more qualified entrepreneurship scholars, the call has increased for the development of terminal degree programs in the area of entrepreneurship (Kuratko, 2005). Currently twenty-one colleges and universities in the United States offer terminal degrees in entrepreneurship. Thus a notable movement to develop entrepreneurship education into a more credible academic focus of study is under way. In addition to enhancing the quantity and quality of entrepreneurship research, entrepreneurship education scholars and advocates have called for more sophisticated methods for designing and delivering entrepreneurial curricula. This curricular and pedagogical movement is not new. In 1988 Gerald E. Hills conducted research on the variations in university entrepreneurship education that cataloged the most common features of entrepreneurship curriculum. More recently, Fiet (2000a, 2000b) called for the development of more theoretically based and academically rigorous curricula in entrepreneurship education. Jack and Anderson (1999) advocated for similar efforts when stating, “As academics we should recognize that entrepreneurship is both an Entrepreneurial Domains 65
art and a science, so that our contribution should be to build critical theoretical knowledge about entrepreneurship and to endow students with the management skills necessary for an entrepreneurial career” (p. 121). Still others such as Envick and Padmanabhan (2006) have advocated for curricular models that position entrepreneurship education in the fluid context of the globalized knowledge economy. Thus entrepreneurship education continues to evolve in areas of curriculum and pedagogy. Despite the ongoing evolution of entrepreneurship education, some curricular, instructional, and experiential learning standards have been established. Specifically, entrepreneurship students most often complete coursework on topics such as financing new ventures, marketing innovations, and developing new ventures. Students are also commonly trained in areas of intellectual property management, strategy and negotiations, and entrepreneurial law. Entrepreneurship students often participate in institutional, regional, national, and global business plan competitions that reward winning teams with start-up funding for their promising venture proposals. These same competitions also connect students with powerful networks of investors and industry experts who are seeking new investment opportunities. These standard curricular components and experiential activities both train students in the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and provide them access to a network of external resources capable of assisting them in venture creation. In other words, students engage in entrepreneurial activities while they learn about the theory and practice of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship education has increasingly become integrated into nonbusiness fields of study. In commenting on the expansion of entrepreneurship education to disciplines outside the management fields, Katz (2003) stated, “Entrepreneurship offerings continue to grow in schools of agriculture, engineering, the learned professions, and arts and sciences, usually with minimal to no involvement by business school entrepreneurship faculty” (p. 295). Other researchers such as Kuratko (2005) and Solomon, Duffy, and Tarabishy (2002) have indicated that an entrepreneurship curriculum is now a common component of degree programs in fields ranging from the fine arts to engineering and science. The U.S. movement to institutionalize cross-disciplinary models of entrepreneurship education has in large part been led by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. In 2003 the foundation established the Kauffman 66
Campuses Initiative, which provided $100 million across eight universities with the goal of making entrepreneurship education accessible to all students, regardless of field of study (Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 2008). In 2006 the initiative was expanded to include six additional campuses and $200 million more in funding. This initiative has helped integrate entrepreneurship education into disciplinary studies that include nursing, the liberal arts, engineering, and education. The underlying purpose of this large initiative was to better prepare students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds for entrepreneurial success through enhanced exposure to the principles and fundamentals of entrepreneurship. This initiative demonstrates both the clarity of the cross-disciplinary expansion of entrepreneurship education and the capacity of intermediating organizations to influence the curricular and instructional core of the academy. The institutionalization of cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship education has been identified as a contributing factor to economic development in the knowledge economy. For instance, Hynes (1996) argued that nonbusiness students are more likely to be innovators than business students. Nonbusiness students, however, are not traditionally trained in the areas essential to moving innovations out of laboratories and into the marketplace. Accordingly, the integration of entrepreneurship into nonbusiness curricula is thought to be an effective strategy for increasing the likelihood that new technologies developed in colleges and universities will become commercialized. Audretsch (2007) argued that the capacities to commercialize and capitalize on innovations are essential to the success of entrepreneurial economies. Similarly, the chief executive officer and president of the Kauffman Foundation, Carl J. Schramm, stated of the intersection between higher education and entrepreneurship, “Our colleges, universities, and business schools should be at the very heart of entrepreneurial capitalism as the biggest contributors to the changing economic landscape” (Schramm, 2006, p. 121). Thus the cross-disciplinary expansion of entrepreneurship education is consistent with the larger movement to enhance the abilities of locales, regions, and nations to compete in the global knowledge-based economy. The integration of entrepreneurship education in scientific and technological fields of study reflects the broader trend of graduates of such programs choosing careers in private industry over the more traditional academic Entrepreneurial Domains 67
professional path (see Stephan, forthcoming). Exposing science and technology students to entrepreneurship education provides them with knowledge and skills that are highly applicable to the knowledge economy. Moreover, entrepreneurial training socializes students to view their research as intellectual property that potentially holds economic value in the private marketplace. As a result, students receiving degrees in science and technology become entrepreneurial agents in the privatization of public knowledge. In short, entrepreneurship education has helped to partially redefine the student role in the context of the capitalist academy. This new role positions students not only as learners and apprentices but also as emerging entrepreneurs who strategically assess commercial opportunities in the academy. Accordingly, students are becoming knowledgeable in market-oriented areas such as intellectual property protection and are seeking out the resources such as entrepreneurship education to aid them in developing the skills necessary to personally capitalize on identified commercial opportunities. The growth and expansion of cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship education has not been limited to research institutions. For instance, entrepreneurship education has begun to capture the interests of community college leaders. This movement is evidenced by the 2003 formation of the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship, which was “created to establish entrepreneurship education as a core offering to foster economic development through community colleges” (2008). The same organization indicated that in 2001, 10 percent of the community colleges in America offered some form of entrepreneurship education. Liberal arts colleges have also begun to include entrepreneurship as a part of their curricular offerings. This trend is evidenced by the 2005 special edition of Peer Review, “Liberal Education and the Entrepreneurial Spirit.” Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities that is designed to provide readers with a quarterly overview of the “emerging trends and key debates in undergraduate liberal education” (2007). This issue’s focus on entrepreneurship includes articles that contend entrepreneurship education is an effective vehicle for improving campus cultures (Weinberg, 2005), enhancing student experiences in civic engagement (Cutrer, 2005; Winfield, 2005), and encouraging students to think about environmental sustainability in innovative and creative ways (Bardaglio, 2005). Although this 68
publication indicates entrepreneurship education has been introduced to the liberal arts community as an emergent and potentially powerful trend, a paucity of research exists on the ultimate implications of such activities. Efforts to enhance the quality of entrepreneurship education have kept pace with more broad pedagogical trends and advancements. For instance, Dale, Torres, Toney-McLin, and Pittman (2005) argued the efficacies of entrepreneurship education as an outreach strategy targeting at-risk students in two Arkansas high schools. Hernandez and Newman (2006) described a model of entrepreneurship education that uses a service-learning approach to capturing the interests of urban students. Lounsbury and Strang (forthcoming) indicated that the number of college and university centers dedicated fully or partly to social entrepreneurship has recently increased, with the intention of providing students with entrepreneurial skills useful in promoting social change and other more community-oriented efforts. The principles of social entrepreneurship have also in certain cases been infused into action-oriented approaches to teaching in liberal arts colleges (Cutrer, 2005; Winfield, 2005). Research has primarily focused on the description of and justification for integrating entrepreneurship education across the disciplinary landscapes of colleges and universities and the related implications on the knowledge economy. Only a limited amount of work, however, exists on the implications of students’ becoming engaged in institutionalized models of entrepreneurship education (see, for example, Creed, Suuberg, and Crawford, 2002; Papayannakis, Kastelli, Damigos, and Mavrotas, 2008; Standish-Kuon and Rice, 2002). Mars (2007) described the cross-disciplinary expansion of entrepreneurship education as in part leading to “the diversification of student learning and faculty scholarship; economic, social, and political gains by individuals and academic departments; and social advancements within disenfranchised communities” (p. 60). Scholars and practitioners have sometimes provided single case studies that demonstrate the benefits of integrating entrepreneurial principles into established curricula and learning activities. For example, Cutrer (2005) described how the inclusion of socially oriented entrepreneurial principles in a political science course enhanced the civic engagement experiences of undergraduate students. Winfield (2005) stated that including entrepreneurship in liberal arts–based coursework encourages students to develop “a necessary Entrepreneurial Domains 69
foundation for developing the ability to envision alternative responses and develop innovative solutions” (p. 15). Some researchers have identified entrepreneurship education as an effective foundation for providing students with various experiential learning opportunities (see Kolb, 1981). In fact, Jones and English (2004) identified entrepreneurship education as an academic movement that is pedagogically grounded in experiential learning. Mars and Hoskinson (forthcoming) described an experiential learning model that through a mock law firm pairs third-year law students with entrepreneurship students for the purpose of exploring the legal principles of entrepreneurship. Honig (2004) underscored the value of experiential learning in efforts designed to prepare entrepreneurial-minded students for the very unpredictable market conditions that are inherent in the knowledge economy.
Activities and Outcomes of Entrepreneurship Education
Like the common output indicators of licensing revenues, intellectual property portfolios, and number of start-up companies created, student entrepreneurship is measured with descriptive statistics. These broad data include measures such as student enrollments, seed money provided to students pursuing entrepreneurial ventures, and the career outcomes of entrepreneurship graduates (see, for example, Charney and Libecap, 2003; Safranski, 2004). Although such data are effective in describing the growth of entrepreneurship education and to a lesser degree the scope of student entrepreneurial activities, student entrepreneurship remains an underresearched phenomenon of the contemporary academy (Mars, 2006). Student entrepreneurship is beginning to capture the attention of higher education researchers, however. Mars, Slaughter, and Rhoades (2008) introduced the role of the state-sponsored student entrepreneur through an exploration of two cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship education programs. The student entrepreneurs studied developed entrepreneurial ventures that centered on the commercialization of scientific discoveries made in university laboratories. The first student-led venture included in the study was being operated at the University of Iowa and involved software capable of assisting biogenetic research. The second student venture was a company that manufactured 70
ecologically friendly paint pigment and was being formed at the University of Texas at El Paso by a doctoral student in chemistry. In both cases the student entrepreneurs had formed business partnerships with their professors and relied on access to university facilities and capital. Using these two cases, Mars, Slaughter, and Rhoades (2008) developed a conceptual framework useful in better understanding the entrepreneurial agency afforded to certain students through the academic capitalist knowledge and learning regime (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). In particular, some student entrepreneurs were argued to have notable market agency based on having access to university-housed resources ranging from intellectual expertise, physical resources such as office space, information technology, and research facilities, and social capital through the legitimacy gained by being associated with a college or university. Mars, Slaughter, and Rhoades (2008) provided several key implications of the emergence of the state-sponsored student entrepreneur. First, the entrepreneurial activities of students contribute to the larger-scale permeation of the boundaries that separate higher education as a public institution from the private marketplace. Second, some student entrepreneurs are empowered to take advantage of the organizational infrastructures that frame the capitalist academy. An important caveat to this point is that data suggest students in disciplines most favored in the knowledge economy (such as science and engineering) are more privileged as state-sponsored entrepreneurs than those students in the lessmarket-oriented disciplinary fields (humanities, social sciences, and education) with entrepreneurial interests. Third, the entrepreneurial learning environment that in large part drives student entrepreneurship negotiates the faculty-student dyad. Although not yet common, entrepreneurial partnerships between professors and students are increasingly being formed. These partnerships inherently dilute the traditional arrangement of professor as teacher and mentor and student as learner and apprentice. The nature of this shift in relationships is the result of each party’s having monetary stakes in a common venture and thus forming an equitable link where the professor as the authority figure is negated or challenged. The structure of professor-student hierarchy and the productivity and objectivity of traditional learning conditions can become compromised. Mars, Slaughter, and Rhoades (2008) also raised important questions about the learning and socialization of students based on their participation in Entrepreneurial Domains 71
entrepreneurship education and related entrepreneurial activities: Will the withholding of knowledge and the constraint of free exchange of ideas in the classroom increase as professors and students try to protect intellectual property that is believed to be commercially viable? Will student entrepreneurship contribute to the marginalization of those students in fields not directly aligned with the economy and knowledge-based markets? Will attrition rise as students abandon their educational pursuits in favor of entrepreneurial ventures? Conversely, Mars, Slaughter, and Rhoades (2008) also highlighted potential gains that may result from students’ engaging more actively in entrepreneurial efforts. For instance, student entrepreneurs may represent emergent agents of economic growth in the local and regional economies that surround colleges and universities. It is unclear, however, how sustainable any entrepreneurial venture might be in its economy of origin. In other words, the long-term implications of student entrepreneurship on more localized economies are uncertain and warrant longitudinal studies of sustainability in local environments. In short, student entrepreneurship is a complex, multifaceted trend that demands ongoing empirical attention. Of course, students engage in entrepreneurial activities that are independent of the formal support and encouragement of colleges and universities. For example, the popular Facebook Internet social networking site was created by a team of entrepreneurs who were also students at Harvard University. The Facebook entrepreneurs developed the site as a grassroots project at Harvard that quickly spread to Yale University and Stanford University. Eventually the student responsible for the site left Harvard to work full time on the Facebook project. The idea for the major online search engine Google emerged from the dissertation work of a Stanford University graduate student. We expect cases of student-led entrepreneurial ventures such as Facebook and Google to grow in numbers as entrepreneurship education continues to expand across the academy and students seek new avenues for market success in this time of economic uncertainty.
Summary
Entrepreneurship education has been well documented as one of the fastestgrowing academic trends in higher education. This growth is both vertical and 72
horizontal. It is vertical in that entrepreneurship is increasing in presence across business colleges as demonstrated by growth measures like course enrollments, the number of endowed chairs, and terminal degree programs specific to entrepreneurship. Horizontal growth refers to the expansion of entrepreneurship education across the disciplinary landscape of higher education as the topic is explored in many disciplines and degree programs. This expansive bidirectional growth of entrepreneurship education cannot be understood by considering only descriptive data. For example, such data do not reflect the potential social value that can be realized through the employment of entrepreneurial strategies in such activities as the civic engagement of students and the community outreach of faculty members. Moreover, the integration of entrepreneurial principles and practices can contribute to the efforts to provide students in a wide range of disciplines with enhanced experiential learning opportunities. More market-oriented benefits are the potential social externalities of local and regional economic growth resulting from the entrepreneurial efforts of students and faculty. In addition, the formation of socially oriented ventures that employ market-oriented strategies to solve a wide variety of societal problems is an encouraging trend. For instance, student entrepreneurs in the global social venture competition hosted each year by the University of California at Berkeley have created more than seventy social ventures. Some continue to be concerned, however, about threats to the integrity of traditional disciplines posed by pervasive market fundamentalism (see Somers and Block, 2005) and faculty neglect of instructional activities because of entrepreneurial engagement. In short, entrepreneurship education represents an interesting and important phenomenon of contemporary higher education and therefore warrants ongoing scholarly attention.
Entrepreneurial Domains
73
T
HIS CHAPTER PAYS SPECIFIC ATTENTION to the growth and cross-disciplinary expansion of entrepreneurship education. Although entrepreneurship has been proposed to be an emergent stand-alone field of study (see Shane and Venkataraman, 2000), we highlight entrepreneurship education as a thread that has increasingly become woven throughout the disciplinary fabric of higher education. First, we briefly describe the relatively recent emergence and growth of entrepreneurship education. Then we summarize and discuss the likely implications of the expansion of entrepreneurship education across nonbusiness fields of study. Throughout this chapter we explore the links of entrepreneurship education to the new economy’s influence on curriculum and instruction and its permeating effects across all academic disciplines and fields of study. The underlying theme of this chapter is that students are not passive in contemporary market-oriented environments but exhibit the agency to engage in entrepreneurship to achieve their individual social and economic goals.
The Emergence and Expansion of Entrepreneurship Education
Entrepreneurship education first emerged in 1947 with Harvard University’s offering the first college-level entrepreneurship course (Katz, 2003). Just over fifty years later, in 2001, data from the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership indicated that enrollments in entrepreneurship courses were as high as fifteen hundred students per semester at a single institution (Safranski, Entrepreneurial Domains 63
2004). In Canada, entrepreneurship education in colleges and universities has grown in terms of course offerings over the last twenty years at rates of 444 percent at the undergraduate level and 232 percent at the graduate level (Menzie, 2004). Likewise, entrepreneurship education has become a relatively common course of study in Europe (Bell, Callaghan, Demick, and Scharf, 2004; Dana, 1992; Garavan and O’Cinneide, 1994; Hytti and O’Gorman, 2004; Jack and Anderson, 1999) and Australia (Jones and English, 2004; Peterman and Kennedy, 2003). Kuratko (2005) attributed the rapid growth of entrepreneurship education to the equally remarkable growth of the entrepreneurial sector of the private economy. Accordingly, the emergence and establishment of entrepreneurship as a field of study has been argued to be at least partially the result of a private market need for trained entrepreneurs. The emergence and establishment of entrepreneurship education has occurred in the academic capitalist knowledge and learning regime (Mars, 2006). Finkle, Kuratko, and Goldsby (2006) described the expansion of entrepreneurship education as a phenomenon at least partially attributable to institutional strategies for seeking new opportunities for capitalizing on external revenue streams. For instance, outside constituencies and would-be benefactors have made the creation of entrepreneurship education centers a contingency of funding support (Finkle and Deeds, 2001). In other circumstances, intermediating organizations (see Metcalfe, 2004) have driven the creation and expansion of entrepreneurship centers in higher education institutions. For instance, nonprofit organizations such as the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Coleman Foundation in the United States and the John Dobson Foundation in Canada have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the efforts to establish and grow entrepreneurship education across higher education. In a 2004 survey of endowed positions in entrepreneurship and closely related fields, Katz (2004) indicated the number of such endowments grew worldwide from 271 in 1999 to 563 in 2003. In the same report, Katz disaggregated this figure to include only endowed entrepreneurship chairs in the United States. This disaggregation revealed a 71 percent growth rate, with the number of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship-related chairs increasing from 237 in 1999 to 406 in 2003. In short, the growth of entrepreneurship education can be argued to be a trend that has been subsidized 64
by private interests and a representation of the resource dependency and neoliberal market structures described by Slaughter and Rhoades (2004). Despite its rapid growth, entrepreneurship education continues to be a source of skepticism in terms of academic legitimacy (Kuratko, 2005). This skepticism originates primarily in the academy and has resulted in a shortage of faculty who are interested in and qualified to teach and conduct research in the area of entrepreneurship (Finkle and Deeds, 2001). This deficiency is further compounded by the reluctance of junior faculty to engage in entrepreneurshiprelated work as a result of the concern that such activities will negatively affect decisions about tenure and promotion (Kuratko, 2005; Mars, 2007). In response, scholars have actively initiated efforts to both legitimize and advance entrepreneurship research. One growth indicator of entrepreneurship scholarship is the establishment of at least forty-four English-language refereed journals specific to research in entrepreneurship or the development of small businesses (Katz, 2003). In addition, scholars have worked to develop a more theoretically and conceptually sound framework for conducting entrepreneurship that combines principles and fundamentals from both the social sciences and management fields (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). Further, to fill a growing number of endowed chairs in entrepreneurship and the need for more qualified entrepreneurship scholars, the call has increased for the development of terminal degree programs in the area of entrepreneurship (Kuratko, 2005). Currently twenty-one colleges and universities in the United States offer terminal degrees in entrepreneurship. Thus a notable movement to develop entrepreneurship education into a more credible academic focus of study is under way. In addition to enhancing the quantity and quality of entrepreneurship research, entrepreneurship education scholars and advocates have called for more sophisticated methods for designing and delivering entrepreneurial curricula. This curricular and pedagogical movement is not new. In 1988 Gerald E. Hills conducted research on the variations in university entrepreneurship education that cataloged the most common features of entrepreneurship curriculum. More recently, Fiet (2000a, 2000b) called for the development of more theoretically based and academically rigorous curricula in entrepreneurship education. Jack and Anderson (1999) advocated for similar efforts when stating, “As academics we should recognize that entrepreneurship is both an Entrepreneurial Domains 65
art and a science, so that our contribution should be to build critical theoretical knowledge about entrepreneurship and to endow students with the management skills necessary for an entrepreneurial career” (p. 121). Still others such as Envick and Padmanabhan (2006) have advocated for curricular models that position entrepreneurship education in the fluid context of the globalized knowledge economy. Thus entrepreneurship education continues to evolve in areas of curriculum and pedagogy. Despite the ongoing evolution of entrepreneurship education, some curricular, instructional, and experiential learning standards have been established. Specifically, entrepreneurship students most often complete coursework on topics such as financing new ventures, marketing innovations, and developing new ventures. Students are also commonly trained in areas of intellectual property management, strategy and negotiations, and entrepreneurial law. Entrepreneurship students often participate in institutional, regional, national, and global business plan competitions that reward winning teams with start-up funding for their promising venture proposals. These same competitions also connect students with powerful networks of investors and industry experts who are seeking new investment opportunities. These standard curricular components and experiential activities both train students in the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and provide them access to a network of external resources capable of assisting them in venture creation. In other words, students engage in entrepreneurial activities while they learn about the theory and practice of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship education has increasingly become integrated into nonbusiness fields of study. In commenting on the expansion of entrepreneurship education to disciplines outside the management fields, Katz (2003) stated, “Entrepreneurship offerings continue to grow in schools of agriculture, engineering, the learned professions, and arts and sciences, usually with minimal to no involvement by business school entrepreneurship faculty” (p. 295). Other researchers such as Kuratko (2005) and Solomon, Duffy, and Tarabishy (2002) have indicated that an entrepreneurship curriculum is now a common component of degree programs in fields ranging from the fine arts to engineering and science. The U.S. movement to institutionalize cross-disciplinary models of entrepreneurship education has in large part been led by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. In 2003 the foundation established the Kauffman 66
Campuses Initiative, which provided $100 million across eight universities with the goal of making entrepreneurship education accessible to all students, regardless of field of study (Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 2008). In 2006 the initiative was expanded to include six additional campuses and $200 million more in funding. This initiative has helped integrate entrepreneurship education into disciplinary studies that include nursing, the liberal arts, engineering, and education. The underlying purpose of this large initiative was to better prepare students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds for entrepreneurial success through enhanced exposure to the principles and fundamentals of entrepreneurship. This initiative demonstrates both the clarity of the cross-disciplinary expansion of entrepreneurship education and the capacity of intermediating organizations to influence the curricular and instructional core of the academy. The institutionalization of cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship education has been identified as a contributing factor to economic development in the knowledge economy. For instance, Hynes (1996) argued that nonbusiness students are more likely to be innovators than business students. Nonbusiness students, however, are not traditionally trained in the areas essential to moving innovations out of laboratories and into the marketplace. Accordingly, the integration of entrepreneurship into nonbusiness curricula is thought to be an effective strategy for increasing the likelihood that new technologies developed in colleges and universities will become commercialized. Audretsch (2007) argued that the capacities to commercialize and capitalize on innovations are essential to the success of entrepreneurial economies. Similarly, the chief executive officer and president of the Kauffman Foundation, Carl J. Schramm, stated of the intersection between higher education and entrepreneurship, “Our colleges, universities, and business schools should be at the very heart of entrepreneurial capitalism as the biggest contributors to the changing economic landscape” (Schramm, 2006, p. 121). Thus the cross-disciplinary expansion of entrepreneurship education is consistent with the larger movement to enhance the abilities of locales, regions, and nations to compete in the global knowledge-based economy. The integration of entrepreneurship education in scientific and technological fields of study reflects the broader trend of graduates of such programs choosing careers in private industry over the more traditional academic Entrepreneurial Domains 67
professional path (see Stephan, forthcoming). Exposing science and technology students to entrepreneurship education provides them with knowledge and skills that are highly applicable to the knowledge economy. Moreover, entrepreneurial training socializes students to view their research as intellectual property that potentially holds economic value in the private marketplace. As a result, students receiving degrees in science and technology become entrepreneurial agents in the privatization of public knowledge. In short, entrepreneurship education has helped to partially redefine the student role in the context of the capitalist academy. This new role positions students not only as learners and apprentices but also as emerging entrepreneurs who strategically assess commercial opportunities in the academy. Accordingly, students are becoming knowledgeable in market-oriented areas such as intellectual property protection and are seeking out the resources such as entrepreneurship education to aid them in developing the skills necessary to personally capitalize on identified commercial opportunities. The growth and expansion of cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship education has not been limited to research institutions. For instance, entrepreneurship education has begun to capture the interests of community college leaders. This movement is evidenced by the 2003 formation of the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship, which was “created to establish entrepreneurship education as a core offering to foster economic development through community colleges” (2008). The same organization indicated that in 2001, 10 percent of the community colleges in America offered some form of entrepreneurship education. Liberal arts colleges have also begun to include entrepreneurship as a part of their curricular offerings. This trend is evidenced by the 2005 special edition of Peer Review, “Liberal Education and the Entrepreneurial Spirit.” Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities that is designed to provide readers with a quarterly overview of the “emerging trends and key debates in undergraduate liberal education” (2007). This issue’s focus on entrepreneurship includes articles that contend entrepreneurship education is an effective vehicle for improving campus cultures (Weinberg, 2005), enhancing student experiences in civic engagement (Cutrer, 2005; Winfield, 2005), and encouraging students to think about environmental sustainability in innovative and creative ways (Bardaglio, 2005). Although this 68
publication indicates entrepreneurship education has been introduced to the liberal arts community as an emergent and potentially powerful trend, a paucity of research exists on the ultimate implications of such activities. Efforts to enhance the quality of entrepreneurship education have kept pace with more broad pedagogical trends and advancements. For instance, Dale, Torres, Toney-McLin, and Pittman (2005) argued the efficacies of entrepreneurship education as an outreach strategy targeting at-risk students in two Arkansas high schools. Hernandez and Newman (2006) described a model of entrepreneurship education that uses a service-learning approach to capturing the interests of urban students. Lounsbury and Strang (forthcoming) indicated that the number of college and university centers dedicated fully or partly to social entrepreneurship has recently increased, with the intention of providing students with entrepreneurial skills useful in promoting social change and other more community-oriented efforts. The principles of social entrepreneurship have also in certain cases been infused into action-oriented approaches to teaching in liberal arts colleges (Cutrer, 2005; Winfield, 2005). Research has primarily focused on the description of and justification for integrating entrepreneurship education across the disciplinary landscapes of colleges and universities and the related implications on the knowledge economy. Only a limited amount of work, however, exists on the implications of students’ becoming engaged in institutionalized models of entrepreneurship education (see, for example, Creed, Suuberg, and Crawford, 2002; Papayannakis, Kastelli, Damigos, and Mavrotas, 2008; Standish-Kuon and Rice, 2002). Mars (2007) described the cross-disciplinary expansion of entrepreneurship education as in part leading to “the diversification of student learning and faculty scholarship; economic, social, and political gains by individuals and academic departments; and social advancements within disenfranchised communities” (p. 60). Scholars and practitioners have sometimes provided single case studies that demonstrate the benefits of integrating entrepreneurial principles into established curricula and learning activities. For example, Cutrer (2005) described how the inclusion of socially oriented entrepreneurial principles in a political science course enhanced the civic engagement experiences of undergraduate students. Winfield (2005) stated that including entrepreneurship in liberal arts–based coursework encourages students to develop “a necessary Entrepreneurial Domains 69
foundation for developing the ability to envision alternative responses and develop innovative solutions” (p. 15). Some researchers have identified entrepreneurship education as an effective foundation for providing students with various experiential learning opportunities (see Kolb, 1981). In fact, Jones and English (2004) identified entrepreneurship education as an academic movement that is pedagogically grounded in experiential learning. Mars and Hoskinson (forthcoming) described an experiential learning model that through a mock law firm pairs third-year law students with entrepreneurship students for the purpose of exploring the legal principles of entrepreneurship. Honig (2004) underscored the value of experiential learning in efforts designed to prepare entrepreneurial-minded students for the very unpredictable market conditions that are inherent in the knowledge economy.
Activities and Outcomes of Entrepreneurship Education
Like the common output indicators of licensing revenues, intellectual property portfolios, and number of start-up companies created, student entrepreneurship is measured with descriptive statistics. These broad data include measures such as student enrollments, seed money provided to students pursuing entrepreneurial ventures, and the career outcomes of entrepreneurship graduates (see, for example, Charney and Libecap, 2003; Safranski, 2004). Although such data are effective in describing the growth of entrepreneurship education and to a lesser degree the scope of student entrepreneurial activities, student entrepreneurship remains an underresearched phenomenon of the contemporary academy (Mars, 2006). Student entrepreneurship is beginning to capture the attention of higher education researchers, however. Mars, Slaughter, and Rhoades (2008) introduced the role of the state-sponsored student entrepreneur through an exploration of two cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship education programs. The student entrepreneurs studied developed entrepreneurial ventures that centered on the commercialization of scientific discoveries made in university laboratories. The first student-led venture included in the study was being operated at the University of Iowa and involved software capable of assisting biogenetic research. The second student venture was a company that manufactured 70
ecologically friendly paint pigment and was being formed at the University of Texas at El Paso by a doctoral student in chemistry. In both cases the student entrepreneurs had formed business partnerships with their professors and relied on access to university facilities and capital. Using these two cases, Mars, Slaughter, and Rhoades (2008) developed a conceptual framework useful in better understanding the entrepreneurial agency afforded to certain students through the academic capitalist knowledge and learning regime (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). In particular, some student entrepreneurs were argued to have notable market agency based on having access to university-housed resources ranging from intellectual expertise, physical resources such as office space, information technology, and research facilities, and social capital through the legitimacy gained by being associated with a college or university. Mars, Slaughter, and Rhoades (2008) provided several key implications of the emergence of the state-sponsored student entrepreneur. First, the entrepreneurial activities of students contribute to the larger-scale permeation of the boundaries that separate higher education as a public institution from the private marketplace. Second, some student entrepreneurs are empowered to take advantage of the organizational infrastructures that frame the capitalist academy. An important caveat to this point is that data suggest students in disciplines most favored in the knowledge economy (such as science and engineering) are more privileged as state-sponsored entrepreneurs than those students in the lessmarket-oriented disciplinary fields (humanities, social sciences, and education) with entrepreneurial interests. Third, the entrepreneurial learning environment that in large part drives student entrepreneurship negotiates the faculty-student dyad. Although not yet common, entrepreneurial partnerships between professors and students are increasingly being formed. These partnerships inherently dilute the traditional arrangement of professor as teacher and mentor and student as learner and apprentice. The nature of this shift in relationships is the result of each party’s having monetary stakes in a common venture and thus forming an equitable link where the professor as the authority figure is negated or challenged. The structure of professor-student hierarchy and the productivity and objectivity of traditional learning conditions can become compromised. Mars, Slaughter, and Rhoades (2008) also raised important questions about the learning and socialization of students based on their participation in Entrepreneurial Domains 71
entrepreneurship education and related entrepreneurial activities: Will the withholding of knowledge and the constraint of free exchange of ideas in the classroom increase as professors and students try to protect intellectual property that is believed to be commercially viable? Will student entrepreneurship contribute to the marginalization of those students in fields not directly aligned with the economy and knowledge-based markets? Will attrition rise as students abandon their educational pursuits in favor of entrepreneurial ventures? Conversely, Mars, Slaughter, and Rhoades (2008) also highlighted potential gains that may result from students’ engaging more actively in entrepreneurial efforts. For instance, student entrepreneurs may represent emergent agents of economic growth in the local and regional economies that surround colleges and universities. It is unclear, however, how sustainable any entrepreneurial venture might be in its economy of origin. In other words, the long-term implications of student entrepreneurship on more localized economies are uncertain and warrant longitudinal studies of sustainability in local environments. In short, student entrepreneurship is a complex, multifaceted trend that demands ongoing empirical attention. Of course, students engage in entrepreneurial activities that are independent of the formal support and encouragement of colleges and universities. For example, the popular Facebook Internet social networking site was created by a team of entrepreneurs who were also students at Harvard University. The Facebook entrepreneurs developed the site as a grassroots project at Harvard that quickly spread to Yale University and Stanford University. Eventually the student responsible for the site left Harvard to work full time on the Facebook project. The idea for the major online search engine Google emerged from the dissertation work of a Stanford University graduate student. We expect cases of student-led entrepreneurial ventures such as Facebook and Google to grow in numbers as entrepreneurship education continues to expand across the academy and students seek new avenues for market success in this time of economic uncertainty.
Summary
Entrepreneurship education has been well documented as one of the fastestgrowing academic trends in higher education. This growth is both vertical and 72
horizontal. It is vertical in that entrepreneurship is increasing in presence across business colleges as demonstrated by growth measures like course enrollments, the number of endowed chairs, and terminal degree programs specific to entrepreneurship. Horizontal growth refers to the expansion of entrepreneurship education across the disciplinary landscape of higher education as the topic is explored in many disciplines and degree programs. This expansive bidirectional growth of entrepreneurship education cannot be understood by considering only descriptive data. For example, such data do not reflect the potential social value that can be realized through the employment of entrepreneurial strategies in such activities as the civic engagement of students and the community outreach of faculty members. Moreover, the integration of entrepreneurial principles and practices can contribute to the efforts to provide students in a wide range of disciplines with enhanced experiential learning opportunities. More market-oriented benefits are the potential social externalities of local and regional economic growth resulting from the entrepreneurial efforts of students and faculty. In addition, the formation of socially oriented ventures that employ market-oriented strategies to solve a wide variety of societal problems is an encouraging trend. For instance, student entrepreneurs in the global social venture competition hosted each year by the University of California at Berkeley have created more than seventy social ventures. Some continue to be concerned, however, about threats to the integrity of traditional disciplines posed by pervasive market fundamentalism (see Somers and Block, 2005) and faculty neglect of instructional activities because of entrepreneurial engagement. In short, entrepreneurship education represents an interesting and important phenomenon of contemporary higher education and therefore warrants ongoing scholarly attention.
Entrepreneurial Domains
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