International Entrepreneurship as an Admittance-Seeking Educational Field

Abstract

ABSTRACT International entrepreneurship (IE) research has gained significant attention over the last 30 years, but IE education has not yet obtained the same recognition. We investigate whether and how IE might gain admittance as a specific educational field. By employing the Delphi method with expert scholars and practitioners from around the world, we identify the key knowledge base and attributes that potential IE graduates should possess. We position our findings relative to extant research on education from IE’s parent disciplines of international business and entrepreneurship. This allows us to discuss whether and how our identified IE curriculum is differentiated and potentially legitimate. We show that while our IE curriculum has these characteristics, it requires contributions from both parent disciplines. From these results, we discuss the pedagogical implications of our study.