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INTRODUCTION

Can entrepreneurship be taught? Anyone who has spent even the slightest time in the classroom ostensibly to teach entrepreneurship has probably encountered this question. It stems from an abiding belief that successful entrepreneurs are, somehow, just “different”. This belief in a “difference” factor or set of factors is rarely articulated with any level of detail. Sometimes it is stated that entrepreneurs have more energy than non-entrepreneurs. Sometimes it is stated that they are greater risk takers, sales people, leaders, or money raisers. Whatever the “difference” factor(s) is or are, it is the opinion of many critics of entrepreneurship education that the topic can be taught, but you can’t make someone an entrepreneur who does not have this “different” factor as a function of god’s will or fortunate genetics. As it is sometimes pithily articulated, one is either born an entrepreneur or not.

Legions of entrepreneurship educators around the country have heard this question and have grown weary of responding. In our opinion, the question furtively is one of those trick questions that sounds profound but has no possible satisfactory answer. It’s similar to a question like “Are you still beating your spouse”? The very attempt to answer the question provides it with undeserved legitimacy. The question about teaching entrepreneurship should not be legitimized with an answer. Entrepreneurship resides in everyone; the same way the ability to play golf resides within everyone. The goal of the golf instructor is not to make you play like Tiger Woods, it is to help you become the best golfer you can be. Likewise, the goal of entrepreneurship education is not to teach “entrepreneurship”, it is to help students become the best entrepreneurs they can become.

Entrepreneurship has caught on as a program of study on university campuses across the United States and around the world. What began primarily as a business school field of study has now migrated to other professional schools, including engineering. While the spread of entrepreneurship education has become standard and even encouraged across an increasingly wide range of disciplines, the approach to teaching entrepreneurship has not been standardized. There are a number of competing perspectives regarding the most effective curriculum for teaching entrepreneurship. To make the matter even more complex, these perspectives differ from school to school (e.g., from the business school to the engineering school) and also from student level to student level (e.g., from undergraduate student to graduate student).1

Business schools were the initial locus for entrepreneurship education, although a few engineering programs such as the one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can lay legitimate claim to being pioneers of the genre. Still, it is not in dispute that entrepreneurship education has become a staple of business school curricula and is a relatively recent addition to other professional programs.2 It has been estimated that entrepreneurship education today is offered in more than 1,600 business schools and in as many as 500 engineering schools. Scholars of the subject have been debating the best way to teach the increasingly popular subject. While the scholarship on curricular approaches is not as robust as the scholarship on other entrepreneurial topics, it is not without its competing schools of thought. However, little scholarship has been directed to distinguishing among the approaches and determining which is superior and under what conditions.

This paper presents a logico-deductive analysis of the leading approaches to entrepreneurship education. We have identified the six leading approaches as:

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Sherrill, W., & Duening, T. (2006, June), Teaching Entrepreneurship To Engineers: A Logico Deductive Review Of Leading Curricula Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--394