Making Entrepreneurship Education Available to All: Design Principles for Educational Programs Stimulating an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Abstract

Over the past decade, entrepreneurship education (EE) has increasingly been introduced as a school-wide approach to stimulating an entrepreneurial mindset across various educational levels. We refer to this as “wide approaches to EE”. Wide approaches to EE require education programs that go beyond simply defining entrepreneurial competencies (the “what” question) and ask for learning activities that enable the enfolding, cultivation, and development of such competencies (the “how” question). Although important steps have been made with respect to addressing the “how” question, principles to actually design wide EE programs are scarce. Here, we advance the educational practice and research regarding wide EE by deducing design principles for wide EE programs across educational levels based on core theories in the entrepreneurship literature, including experiential learning, social constructivism, and effectuation theory. The 11 design principles represent the entrepreneurial process, the task, and the context and relationships of wide EE programs, and are discussed in three European cases from different educational levels in order to illustrate how the design principles can be used for understanding wide EE practices. The identified design principles can promote evidence-informed discussion among teachers, curriculum designers, policy-makers, scholars, and others regarding the design, implementation, and investigation of wide EE programs.