International Entrepreneurship Education

Abstract

There are many debates on whether or not entrepreneurship can be taught. With hundreds of business schools in the United States offering various kinds of entrepreneurial education, the answer seems clear. Nevertheless, different schools offer various pedagogical approaches and information included in entrepreneurship education. How to educate students with a global entrepreneurship mind set remains one of the most challenging questions in international entrepreneurship education. There are at least five things that international business (IB) scholars can do to encourage international entrepreneurship education. First, IB scholars write about educational insights in their research papers to convey takeaways for other educators, and do not merely write about implications for future research and policy, currently the typical way to conclude the discussion part of IB research papers. Second, IB scholars can bring international entrepreneurship research into the classroom; that is, there should be a greater interplay between the different activities of IB scholars in respect of teaching and research so that they better complement one another. Third, IB scholars should make efforts to understand the context from which students in their classes come, in order to be able to better utilize student attributes and convey messages to students in ways that they best understand. Fourth, IB scholars should encourage curriculum development that provides tools for understanding the roles of law, culture, economics and finance, trade, migration, behavioral biases, and opportunities in different parts of the world. Fifth, IB scholars should encourage students to learn from each other’s international entrepreneurship experiences. Many issues have been addressed in international entrepreneurship education research. To begin, many studies have shown that common pedagogical approaches in international business education could directly apply to international entrepreneurship education. For example, Tan and Ng (2006) find that problem-based learning (PBL) or the “learning-by-dong” approach works well in entrepreneurship education. In their study, they provide 16 problems that simulate entrepreneurial situations and ask students to complete these problems within a 16-week semester. Their study shows that these problems enhance students’ appreciation and capacity for entrepreneurship