Business Transfer Paradox in Entrepreneurship Education: Research directions for increasing the number of successors

Abstract

Most of the entrepreneurship education (EE) efforts have been directed to business creation as the preferred option for entrepreneurial activity. Considering the ever-increasing number of businesses to be transferred and thus the need for people who are willing and interested in seeing a business transfer as a career option, this one-sided view is unsatisfactory. Inspired by the "attention-interest-desire-action"" model from marketing, this paper brings together the existing literature and the authors' own research and teaching experience to propose research directions that can lay the theoretical foundation to incorporate business transfers more clearly in EE. This underlines that value creation through entrepreneurship can take different forms and adds a missing but relevant part to RE and its development.