University of Southern Denmark: IDEA Centre for Promoting Entrepreneurship Education Across the University

Abstract

The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) uses a centralized approach to spread and integrate EE across its six campuses and its five faculties. SDU’s EE is primarily based on a comprehensive and broad understanding of entrepreneurship in the sense of innovation and value creation. The SDU-annexed IDEA Entrepreneurship Centre plays a major role in developing adequate curricular courses, offering additional extra-curricular courses for start-up oriented students and alumni, as well as training educators from non-business faculties in EE. SDU aims at making one EE course obligatory in all study lines. So far, SDU provides 61 EE courses across all areas. Still most of the courses, and hence participants, belong to the faculty of social sciences. Many students only have a vague idea of what entrepreneurship is and only refer to it as “something with business”; hence they tend not to pick an EE course. Therefore, making EE courses compulsory in Bachelors or Master programmes (e.g. Sports and Health), or both, has been a crucial element in increasing student numbers attending EE. In SDU’s experience, an independent umbrella institution like IDEA organising all EE activities across the university helps to avoid the fear of “fighting over students”.