Teaching and facilitating action-based entrepreneurship education: Addressing challenges towards a research agenda

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education is an increasingly distinct domain with particular approaches emphasizing experiential and action-based design. Action-based entrepreneurship education aims to deliver authenticity in entrepreneurial experiences while simultaneously facilitating learning and fair assessment. A venture creation program (VCP) is one such type of action-based entrepreneurship education which uses the creation of a new venture as the main vehicle for students' learning, complemented with more traditional educational content. Engaging students in creating real-life ventures enables unique opportunities for learning but introduces a tension between didactic and pragmatic approaches and thus various challenges for educators. This paper's purpose is to address current controversies related to VCPs and offer research-driven suggestions to key challenges. The empirical investigation, consisting of focus group data and individual interviews, builds on the accumulated knowledge of a global collaborative forum for VCPs—the VCP Forum—which consists of 11 VCPs in six countries in Europe and North America. The findings highlight three main areas that present challenges to educators: (1) facilitating students' venture creation processes, (2) assessment of the students' work connected to real-life activity, and (3) mitigating interaction with external stakeholders. The present paper contributes to entrepreneurship education research by suggesting areas for pedagogic development that need further investigation.