Challenges Facing Entrepreneurship Education

In my last blog, Entrepreneurship Education: Unlocking Potential, I wrote about the key success factors of entrepreneurship education.

Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills are core components to building socially inclusive and highly participatory economies in an increasingly global and competitive world.

Innovation and economic growth depend on being able to produce future leaders with the skills and attitudes to be entrepreneurial in their professional lives, whether by creating their own companies or innovating in larger organizations. It is imperative to develop entrepreneurial skills, attitudes and behaviours in school systems (primary, secondary, higher and vocational education) reaching across all ages as part of a lifelong learning process.

Despite the tremendous growth in entrepreneurship education around the world, many challenges remain.

One of the predominant challenges is to address the culture and mindset in countries and regions around the world in which business and entrepreneurship are either not viewed favorably and/or are not understood. The low exposure to business and entrepreneurship, combined with the lack of role models, makes the barriers to entry in many countries seemingly high. Entrepreneurship education can help promote an entrepreneurial and innovative culture by changing mindsets and providing the necessary skills.

At the same time, there is no “one size fits all” solution for entrepreneurship education. The challenges and opportunities for entrepreneurship vary dramatically in different parts of the world as well as for different segments of the educational journey. It is not appropriate to import models from other parts of the world without modification. Local context must be taken into account in devising and tailoring a set of programmes and initiatives relevant for each area.

Entrepreneurship is still trying to secure its academic credibility, which can create difficulties in efforts to embed entrepreneurship into the school systems. Securing the support of the heads of the academic institutions as well as the governments, which are often the primary funders, is critical. Often within academia, champions of entrepreneurship have to fight internal battles for support and funding of their activities.

In most countries, the bulk of the funding for schools and universities still comes from governments, although this is beginning to change as companies, foundations and alumni have begun to contribute. The field of entrepreneurship education is still relatively young and it is therefore important and necessary that public and private support is continued until entrepreneurship is embedded in a sustainable manner in schools and universities as well as through informal education systems.

There are many new models being tested around the world, both inside and outside of formal educational systems, which need to be shared more broadly to fuel new and more effective approaches to entrepreneurship education. More must also be done to facilitate faculty collaboration, exchanges and research across borders.

More effective measurement and evaluation of the impact of entrepreneurship education programmes is needed. These should be based on a broadly defined set of outcomes, not only on narrow measures such as the number of start-ups created which focus on short-term results without measuring the longer term impact.

While an increasing number of entrepreneurship education programmes exist today compared to a decade ago, scalability and penetration remain key challenges. Technology and media provide mechanisms for reaching greater economies of scale as well as providing greater access and sharing of practices. These should be further explored and leveraged.

Entrepreneurship has never been more important than at this time to solve our pressing global challenges. Embedding entrepreneurship in education and providing greater access are the first and arguably most important steps for building an innovative culture and creating a new wave of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial individuals and organizations.