The discussion on how to teach and learn entrepreneurship holds several dilem- mas. Through examining the literature on teaching and training entrepreneurship and the literature on entrepreneurial learning, we have identified five fundamen- tal dilemmas expressed in a larger number of texts:
l Whether teaching should be for entrepreneurship or about entrepreneur- ship.
3 groups of strategic questions
l University role in its context and institutional norms.
l The portfolio of courses and the target group for
entrepreneurial education.
l The purpose of teaching and the learning process of each entrepreneurial course.
Figure 2. The structure of the chapter 5 dilemmas in
entrepreneurship education:
l For or about entrepreneurship?
l Management or entrepreneurship theory?
l At the university or elsewhere?
l Individually or collectively?
l Art or science?
3 key dimensions of reflection:
l Ivory tower or entrepreneurial university?
l Learning or teaching?
l Entrepreneurship or enterprising
behaviour?
l The foundation of teaching – whether it should be based on management theories or on some not-as-yet-defined theory of entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship.
l The situating of the education – should it be placed within the secure context of the university auditorium or in small firms, or somewhere in between academia and practice.
l Whether students should work individually (the heroic Schumpeterian entrepreneur) or collectively (the entrepreneurial network entrepre- neur).
l How the substance of what is taught is formulated – whether entrepreneur- ship is conceptualized as an art or a science.
As we shall see at the end of the chapter, most of these dilemmas concern the way the university relates to its context, the relationship between learning and teaching entrepreneurship as well as the question of whether we seek enterpris- ing behaviour or entrepreneurship.
For or About Entrepreneurship
There are several reasons why students might want to study entrepreneurship (Jack and Anderson, 1999); they may want to start up a business of their own, but they may also be interested in acquiring and developing general knowledge about entrepreneurship based on an intellectual ambition.
The decision about whether to teach for entrepreneurship or about entrepre- neurship is closely related to the question of whether education seeks to improve the student’s ability to perform entrepreneurial action as a practical activity, on the one hand, or to learn about entrepreneurship as an academic subject, on the other (Gibb, 2002; Laukkanen, 1998).
Teaching for entrepreneurship is often centred on improving the student’s ability to write a business plan. Students are taught to see the formulation of their potential business idea as sequential by going through a number of phases such as problem recognition (including problem description, information gather- ing and problem analysis), formulation and evaluation of alternatives as well as implementation. In the business plan courses, the students thus describe and define their business, describe their management team and firm structure, de- scribe the market, decide on a marketing plan and a business system, and choose how to implement their business idea with respect to finance, risks and cash flow.
To gain insight into the different elements of the business plan, entrepreneur- ship education seeking to improve the student’s ability to perform entrepreneurial action often involves a number of functional specialization courses. Similar to traditional management education, courses on marketing, organization, finance
and accounting are given. These courses usually differ from the traditional func- tional specialization courses only in the way that they are taught ‘with a twist’ of entrepreneurship.
When the aim of entrepreneurship education is primarily to increase the stu- dent’s general knowledge about entrepreneurship, courses on the history of entrepreneurship theory dominate. Students are introduced to the classics of entrepreneurship theory. These courses typically have three key elements. One is about Schumpeter (1934), Kirzner (1973) and other pioneers of Austrian economics focusing on creative destruction and on the entrepreneur as the crea- tor of societal innovation. Another element of these courses, with a more psychological and sociological focus, is the personal traits approach. Students are introduced to Weber (1905 [2001]) and the spirit of capitalism, and to Mc- Clelland’s (1961) theories of the entrepreneur as an individual with a strong need for achievement and high internal beliefs of control. Finally, these courses introduce the students to more contemporary theories of entrepreneurship, for example, theories focusing on the relationship between the entrepreneur and situations that hold opportunities, in order to identify how the entrepreneur identifies or creates opportunities (Eckhardt and Shane, 2003; Shane and Venka- taraman, 2000)
The distinction between courses for and about entrepreneurship outlined above is, of course, simplistic. Improving the ability to act entrepreneurially will support the academic competencies of entrepreneurship, and knowledge about entrepreneurship will improve practical competencies, but there is little doubt that some programmes stress practical application while others seek a more conceptual development (Garavan and O’Cinneide, 1994).
Management or Entrepreneurship Theories
Generally there is a lack of clear definitions of the concept of entrepreneurship, leading to the lack of a clear boundary for the academic field of entrepreneur- ship. Jack and Anderson (1999) indicated that the term covers different fields, ranging from small business operations via new venture creation to a broader meaning of general innovation and individualism.
Whether or not teaching is for or about entrepreneurship, some sort of theo- retical foundation is needed. A key question, therefore, is, which theories to build upon? Entrepreneurship theories can be seen as a means of helping po- tential entrepreneurs to understand the future and the consequences of their actions. Drawn to its extreme, this line of thinking may even see theory as a way of providing the ‘ought’ in entrepreneurial action (Fiet, 2000; Gibb, 2002).
Such an approach, however, tends to create too much generalization and too little contextualization (Laukkanen, 1998). As indicated in the paragraph above on the dilemma of ‘for or about’, entrepreneurship education seems to build on
two different kinds of intellectual heritage: the institutional heritage from busi- ness schools and the theoretical heritage from entrepreneurship theory. At the business schools, entrepreneurship courses are usually taught by teachers who are primarily educated in economics and management. This leads to a very strong emphasis on management theories as the fundamental theoretical back- ground in entrepreneurship education.
When performing entrepreneurship, fundamental business knowledge and skills are required. Fundamental entrepreneurial problems such as how to dis- cover opportunities, how to evaluate the attractiveness of industries, how to marshal resources and how to create a competitive advantage may be explained by more general economics and management theories such as network theory, consumer behaviour theory, industrial organization theory, game theory, agency theory, transactions cost theory or resource-based theory (Fiet, 2000).
Thus, teaching entrepreneurship often seems to group together a large number of areas and topics from traditional management education (Fiet, 2000), but often without a thorough conceptual foundation relating it to entrepreneurship.
The strong theoretical heritage from entrepreneurship theory is another influ- ence. The theories of entrepreneurship are, however, primarily descriptive. A problem of using entrepreneurship theory in entrepreneurship education is thus that it has little to say with respect to the question of teaching ‘for’
entrepreneurship.
As argued by Jack and Anderson (1999), each entrepreneurial event is unique and idiosyncratic, and the entrepreneurial process is a result of complex and contingent variables. The essence of the entrepreneur lies in his or her ability to go beyond the difficulties that others have had in foreseeing the opportunity.
This involves uniqueness, sensitivity and ability to cope with the unknowable in the sense that no formal correct procedure exists for decisions. Instead, en- trepreneurial actions seem explicitly to involve an anti-positivistic, subjective and judgemental approach to problems based on personal knowledge.
These problems could lead to the development of a more action-orientated theory as inspired by Austrian economics (Jakobsen, 1992). However, little has been achieved so far in the attempt to explicitly combine such an approach with more formal entrepreneurship education.
University – Small Firms or Elsewhere
Factual knowledge and skills can be taught in the classroom, but the entrepre- neurial event is also dependent on individual and contextual knowledge. This sort of knowledge primarily stems from personal experience.
The lack of entrepreneurial experience among university staff, combined with the general lack of entrepreneurial experience among students (Jack and An- derson, 1999), tends to produce classroom situations which focus heavily on
what the participants feel comfortable with: theory, either normative manage- ment theory adjusted to give advice for entrepreneurship and small business, or descriptive entrepreneurship theory explaining societal innovation by the emer- gence of entrepreneurs and their personal traits.
Since it would probably be quite difficult to change both the population of teachers and the population of students, the experience aspect has to be brought in from elsewhere. One way is in the form of guest lecturers from the ‘real world’, serving as the case study input which conventional pedagogy is familiar with.
These kinds of case stories, however, do not transcend the traditional pedagogy.
Still, enterprising behaviour cannot be created in a contextual vacuum. To enhance this behaviour, universities have to open doors – both within the uni- versity to create networks between faculties and departments and to the outside in order to create networks with industry and government in the environment.
This is not an easy task. Institutional norms, incitement systems and general prejudices hinder fruitful experiments on these matters.
Individually or Collectively
Most approaches to entrepreneurial education adopt an individually centred approach. This individualism can be expressed in two ways: the entrepreneur- ship content and the educational context (Laukkanen, 1998: 2–3).
The entrepreneurship content focuses on the individual. An example is the heroic entrepreneur, who (as an alert individual) identifies opportunities and marshals resources in order to start his own firm. It is rarely recognized that this economic process is also an organization of social processes (Johannisson and Lundberg, 2002) where the actions of other people are influenced and co-ordinated.
In a similar way, the educational context focuses on the individual. Conven- tional university teaching is dominated by the idea of transferring knowledge from one individual to another. One could thus argue that the pedagogical con- text does little to improve the student’s ability to organize the social processes, which a large part of entrepreneurial action is about.
Alternative learning processes may, however, take place in groups or com- munities which do not have learning, but some sort of enterprising behaviour as its primary goal. Teamwork among students or collaboration with other members of the community with different experiences has the potential for creating entrepreneurial behaviour among students.
Art or Science
Within the university context, we tend to think of entrepreneurship as a theoreti- cal discipline. A central problem is, however, that we cannot theoretically
replicate the experiences of successful entrepreneurs (Jack and Anderson, 1999).
Some of the keywords related to entrepreneurship seem to be ‘experimenta- tion’, ‘novelty’, ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’, ‘flexibility’, ‘uniqueness’, ‘autonomy’,
‘self-direction’ and ‘self-expression’ (Garavan and O’Cinneide, 1994; Jack and Anderson, 1999). These words are often associated with artists. From this point of view entrepreneurship may also be characterized as an economic art form, where the entrepreneur creates something that did not exist before (Jack and Anderson; 1999).
On the one hand, entrepreneurship can thus be seen as an art form because it is ‘generative proactive’ and not just a ‘passive, descriptive and contemplative’
theoretical discipline trying to describe and analyse entrepreneurial situations (Cockx et al., 2000). The art of entrepreneurship can be understood as an ability or mastery that may be based on profound theoretical knowledge, but where the essence of the art form is the person’s ‘ability to apply it creatively and with ini- tiative in practice’ (Cockx et al., 2000: 22).
From this point of view the person him or herself must generate the skills of thinking entrepreneurially, probably through personal learning processes. This is quite different from more theoretical approaches trying to analyse the entre- preneurial situation. It is probably easier to train someone on the basis of
‘situation centred’ skills than to train them on the basis of ‘personal centred’
skills (Cockx et al., 2000).