Research on Entrepreneurship "Education"
This article was machine-translated from Japanese by AI (Claude). It may contain errors. Read the original Japanese article.
Research on entrepreneurship is conducted at a wide range of universities.
Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs are studied in fields such as management, economics, psychology, and social networks, covering the traits of individual entrepreneurs, what kinds of entrepreneurs tend to succeed, and the economic effects that startups bring.
On the other hand, I think research on entrepreneurship "education" has not advanced as far as research on entrepreneurship itself. As pointed out in a literature review of prior research on entrepreneurship education overseas, it seems that, both in Japan and abroad, research has not kept up with the practice of education.
The Current State of Entrepreneurship Education
To begin with, unlike other kinds of education, entrepreneurship education has no settled answer of "just do this." Specifically, none of the following has been fully settled yet:
- Purpose (why) - What are we teaching for?
- Content (what) - What are we teaching?
- Method (how) - How are we teaching it?
Take other kinds of education, such as an elementary school science class. There is broad agreement on "what are we teaching for," and "what are we teaching" is almost entirely settled. As a result, educational research on ordinary subjects often focuses on "how are we teaching," and lesson studies are conducted to produce better outcomes.
In entrepreneurship education, purpose, content, and method are all still unsettled (although I get the impression that a rough direction is starting to emerge overseas). For that reason, the foundation for discussion and research in Japan also seems not to be very well developed.
Measuring Educational Effects Is Also Insufficient
Perhaps because the purpose, content, and method are not settled, the educational effects have not been discussed sufficiently either.
Some schools may use the number of startups founded as a target variable, but it would take quite a long time for that figure to show up as a result of education. For example, if someone started a company right after taking a course, it is highly likely that they were simply a person already prepared to start a company who happened to come to the class.
Student satisfaction is sometimes collected, but it has almost no relationship to educational outcomes. Satisfaction rises if credits are easy to earn, and it comes out high if the guest lectures are entertaining. I think it is fine to collect satisfaction as a rough reference, but it is better to consider it separately from educational outcomes.
There are probably also cases where a questionnaire such as "How useful was this class?" is given after the class. But this too is probably not an appropriate way to measure educational outcomes. There are issues of reliability and validity, and if what is useful is knowledge with immediate application, that is closer to training, and we would have to return to the discussion of whether training is the purpose of the class. Even if we turned it into a question about the future, such as "Do you think this class will be useful?", it would simply become harder to answer, and we would not get very good responses.
As with other subjects, we can also use scores on paper tests. That would measure how well knowledge has been retained, but is the educational outcome of entrepreneurship education really aimed at retaining knowledge about starting a business? Probably not.
When things get a little more specialized, entrepreneurial intention is sometimes used. However, the questions that check entrepreneurial intention are strong ones such as "I am prepared to do anything to become an entrepreneur," and raising that through a class alone is quite difficult.
Moreover, entrepreneurial intention can also fall as a result of a class, because students come to understand whether they are suited to starting a business. And understanding that is not a bad thing at all; it is rather a good thing. So I think it is not very desirable to use rises and falls in entrepreneurial intention as the educational outcome of a class. (I do think it is fine to measure it, though.)
Because the purpose, content, and method of education are unsettled in this way, it is hard to say that such effect measurement is sufficiently settled either.
Perhaps as a result, entrepreneurship education in which no research is conducted seems to find it hard to keep a cycle of educational improvement turning. I suspect that many classes end up being "done and left," and that any improvement takes the form of improving operations, revising content based on experience and intuition, or following examples from other schools.
Toward Research on Entrepreneurship "Education"
Given this background, if we are going to promote entrepreneurship education going forward, I think we need to carry out educational research in parallel, define the purpose, content, and method, measure effects, and improve the educational content as appropriate.
Looking at other countries, the EU is actively working to systematize effect measurement, for example by developing a tool that automatically generates a set of questions to measure the educational effects on participants (EPIC Course Assessment Tool). I think a cycle of effect measurement and improvement has begun to turn there.
Depending on the purpose, if the education being provided has no effect toward that purpose, it should be stopped, and if something more effective exists, it should be swapped in. If other kinds of education are more effective than entrepreneurship education for achieving the purpose, I think it would even be fine to abandon entrepreneurship education itself.
Its theoretical positioning is also important. For example, even if one runs a practice-based class, unless one can give a sufficient answer to "How is entrepreneurship education different from Project-based Learning or design thinking education that use business as their subject?", one will not be able to convey the significance of teaching entrepreneurship education as a separate subject.
Precisely because this is such an immature field, unless the people who practice education take the lead in conducting research, its value cannot be positioned. I think this is a field in which the people who teach entrepreneurship are expected to exercise entrepreneurship themselves and pioneer the way.
That said, it is also true that many schools find it difficult in terms of resources to do both practice and research. I should add that some kind of support from the schools will probably be necessary, such as allocating resources for research when they practice entrepreneurship education.