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Tommaso Minola (University of Bergamo)

1 June 2017 @ 12:00

 

  • Past event

“Too much of a good thing? When entrepreneurial education turns (not) into entrepreneurial learning”

at Department of Economics and Statistics S. Cognetti de Martiis, Seminar Room

abstract

Despite the worldwide increase in entrepreneurship education offered at universities, there is an ongoing debate whether and under which conditions this type of education contributes to students’ entrepreneurial learning. Building on human capital theory, we hypothesise that the exposure to various entrepreneurship education initiatives has an inverted U-shaped relationship with entrepreneurial learning outcomes. We also argue that this relationship is moderated by the entrepreneurial experience of the students, the teaching pedagogy applied in entrepreneurial initiatives offered at the university and the prevalence of opportunity-driven entrepreneurship in the country. A multi-level analysis on a cross-country sample of 87,918 students resulting from GUESSS (‘Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students´ Survey’) strongly confirms our hypotheses, and allows us to discuss implications for researchers, educators and policy makers with respect to the nature of entrepreneurial learning, the design of entrepreneurial education programs, as well as the contextual conditions that impact entrepreneurial learning outcomes.