An entrepreneurship education taxonomy based on authenticity

Abstract

The future engineer is labelled an entrepreneurial engineer, having networking, teamwork, opportunity recognition, creativity, risk management, and discipline-specific skills. Therefore, entrepreneurship education is being increasingly introduced in engineering education. The various educational designs used to introduce entrepreneurship education have been discussed extensively, but a clear scheme for the classification of such methods is not available. In this study, a classification scheme for entrepreneurship education is introduced by building on prior frameworks and authentic learning situations to differentiate educational approaches and learning contexts. We explore and combine different models of entrepreneurship education offered at 10 technical universities in the Nordic countries. Through this exploration, we identify three categories of learning contexts, which we label ‘imitation’, ‘pretence’, and ‘real,’ adding to the three classes of educational conceptions identified in the literature and verified through empirical data: ‘teacher-directed’, ‘participatory’, and ‘self-directed’. This leads to a six-class taxonomy for entrepreneurship education approaches.