Entrepreneurship Education: Methods and tools to increase successful academic venture creation

Abstract

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) face a high degree of complexity when designing entrepreneurial education programmes at the level of University Business Incubators (UBIs) and beyond. Our paper addresses these concerns by answering the question: "What are the entrepreneurial and pedagogical methods, templates and tools that a new academic venture needs to be exposed to in order to not only raise awareness but also increase the level of successful start-up creation?". To this end, we seek to build a framework that delineates different entrepreneurial education (EE) approaches along the lifecycle of new venture creation at universities. Moreover, we reflect our theory-based framework with a case study of different EE education provided to different target groups (students, academic venture teams) at a German university, i.e. the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and its excellence start-up centre "Worldfactory". This study will provide new insights into EE and higher education, and the dynamics of new ventures and their entrepreneurs in the awareness EE stage.