Imagine there’s no [competitions] (…)
Nothing to kill or die for (…)
You may say I’m a dreamer.
But I’m not the only one.”
John Lennon, “Imagine”
[This text was written with the aim to become a book chapter in a book published by Edward Elgar in late 2024 – “Annals of Entrepreneurship Education & Pedagogy, Vol 6” edited by Santos & Simmons. Feedback is much welcome, especially since the final version of the text has not been submitted for publication yet!]
Introduction
Unreflected and stereotypic views of entrepreneurship are everywhere. Ask a random person in the street about entrepreneurship, and you will likely hear a view of entrepreneurs being in business for the money, going their own way to win fame and fortune in fierce competition. A journey where only a few exceptional heroes succeed. Such views are relayed not only in the media, but also in educational institutions where many students then conclude that “entrepreneurship is not for me”.
Debunking this popular myth of entrepreneurship has been done before (Berglund & Verduijn, 2018; Ogbor, 2000), but it nevertheless persists. Therefore, I will here again attempt to see entrepreneurship and its education in a new way, beyond taken for granted views. My take on this long-standing matter is a research-informed creative thought experiment. I will share six less typical perspectives accumulated through a decade of action research in a setting rather toxic to entrepreneurship – primary schools in formerly socialist Sweden. School teachers have helped me find new pathways through the usual self-oriented jungle of “what’s in it for me?” perspectives to entrepreneurship, to instead arrive at a more pleasant meadow where entrepreneurship as practice is something deeply relational, prosocial, inclusive and team-oriented.
This chapter was written by invitation from the editors, asking me to provide a leading edge research perspective. I opted for a personal and reader-friendly writing style. However, please do not to let this mislead you. Insights were generated through a rigorous empirical data collection process involving tens of thousands of teachers and students on all levels of education. We used a powerful new digital research methodology called designed action sampling (Lackéus & Sävetun, 2023), collecting more than 100,000 reflections, enough data to analyze for a lifetime. The editorial invitation became a timely opportunity to convey, already now, some general conclusions thus far.
Inspired by philosopher of science Karl Popper, I will label the established view of entrepreneurship a white swan, and the less typical view a black swan. Popper (1959) is famous for claiming the impossibility of proving a theory through inductive data collection. He exemplified with the claim “all swans are white”. While it is impossible to examine every swan in the world to prove that they are all white, it is indeed possible to falsify such a claim simply through finding one single black swan. Falsification will here be used to unsettle dogmatic views of entrepreneurship and its education.
The white swan: Entrepreneurship as competing, making money and winning in the market
Seeing the world through the eyes of educators can help us grasp the established view of entrepreneurship more clearly. What do people end up doing when teaching others about entrepreneurship? When left to their own devices, many entrepreneurship teachers set up pitching competitions (Brentnall, 2023), let their students create mini-businesses based on own ideas (Hägg & Gabrielsson, 2019), ask students to play with money or business games (Mwasalwiba, 2010), draw on heroic white male billionaire celebrities to inspire their students (Berglund & Verduijn, 2018), or bring a local millionaire hero inside the classroom to inspire (Raible & Williams-Middleton, 2021). They do all of this for a small minority of self-selected business students (Liñán et al., 2018). In many cases, these students represent a tiny fraction of the total population being educated (Martínez et al., 2010). In line with this, many people in society see entrepreneurship as being about making money, winning despite fierce competition, going your own way with your own ideas and staging a lone heroic career to “kill or die for”. Alas, it seems that observing the average entrepreneurship teacher only confirms the most stereotypic beliefs about entrepreneurship.
The black swan: Entrepreneurship as relational and helping-oriented co-creation of the future
You may say I’m a dreamer, but let’s now instead imagine a parallell universe of entrepreneurship education (EE) somewhere out there, with no business competitions, no venture creation courses, no student business ideas, no business simulations, no money-making challenges, no inspirational guest lectures, no billionaire role-models and no elite entrepreneurship programs. Could it really exist? Who would be that rare teacher? Is it even possible to infuse entrepreneurship into education without letting students compete, brainstorm business ideas or listen to inspirational entrepreneurs?
It is possible. Just like there are black swans to be found in nature (Cygnus atratus), we can falsify the established view of entrepreneurship and its education. We only need to find one single entrepreneur or example of EE that lacks all the usual elements and that still is entrepreneurial. I’ve seen it, not just once but quite a few times, so it’s clearly not a dream. As much as entrepreneurship can be about winning and money, it can also be about co-creating the future together with new acquaintances, getting feedback from them on attempts made to help them, engaging with their ideas around what might create new value in society, and building deeply personal relationships with people in the world outside one’s own building, school or campus.
For many entrepreneurs, everyday working life is indeed primarily about prosocial relations with colleagues and customers, cooperative co-creation of shared value and a deeply passionate and imaginative appreciation of how society might in the future become better. When engaged in creating a better future, one is competing not so much against others, but against the almighty status quo in society – the ways we’ve always done things.
What if we got entrepreneurship wrong?
What if personal wealth and market dominance are mere by-products of really successful entrepreneurship? What if there is a misconception here that has been left uncorrected for decades in the minds of educators, students and the general public? If this is the case, we may have gotten entrepreneurship education wrong too. I will therefore here carry out a creative investigation, in six steps, of two swans; the common “white swan” thesis of entrepreneurship and its education, and the rare “black swan” antithesis. For each step, a common view among educators is first presented, followed by a contemplation around what definition(s) of entrepreneurship it represents. Then comes a brief outline of its antithesis, as well as some empirical examples from “black swan” teachers. All six steps are summarized in Table 1.
The aim here is not to prove any singular truth or convey a correct way to define entrepreneurship, but rather to provide a thought-provoking creative re-description of entrepreneurship and its education (Danermark et al., 2002, p.88-95). This re-description corresponds largely to the view I personally live by in my everyday work as educator, scholar and entrepreneur. It is an uncommon view to have, but rest assured that “I’m not the only one”. Many others before me have tried to de-construct the dominant image of entrepreneurship (e.g., Berglund & Verduijn, 2018). What is novel here is perhaps the combinatory nature of this attempt to re-construct entrepreneurship and its education.
| Challenges with taken-for-granted stereotypic views among many entrepreneurship educators | From mainly Me… | …to also We | How to think in a different way as an entrepreneurship educator |
| “Competitions for students is a great format” – not really, especially not for all | Competing | Cooperating | Let them cooperate with outsiders – compete with status quo instead of with each other |
| ”Creating a venture really motivates students” – in many cases not so much actually | Venture creation | Value creation | It is rather the feedback on the value created for others that really motivates students |
| ”Student business ideas are great” – rarely so, most student ideas are dull | Idea centric | Action centric | Let them take engaged reflective action instead, regardless of whose idea it was from the start |
| ”Challenges and simulations are fun” – maybe, but what learning do you aim to achieve? | Trans-actional | Relational | Let them create all kinds of value for people and planet, in relational ways that are for free |
| ”Guests and celebrities really inspire students” – only as a relief from boredom, and with side-effects | Hedonic heroism | Prosocial teamwork | Let real-world local and team-based value creation for others inspire them instead |
| ”We only admit the most engaged students” – fine, if you want to widen the gap even further | Exclusive club | Inclusive treatment | Let all students get a chance to develop their entrepreneurial abilities |
Table 1. An investigation in six steps of thesis and antithesis in entrepreneurship and its education.
What is entrepreneurship?
To facilitate the contemplation around what definition(s) of entrepreneurship each swan represents, I will first establish a common definitional ground around what entrepreneurship fundamentally is. Entrepreneurship historians have made numerous summarizations of definitional perspectives (e.g., Landström, 1999). Three perspectives are particularly common; innovation, opportunities and organization creation (Landström, 2007, p.11). Gartner (1990) conducted a factor analysis of responses from experts that resulted in eight different definitional perspectives; the entrepreneur, innovation, organization creation, value creation, profit or nonprofit, growth, uniqueness and the owner-manager. The value creation perspective of entrepreneurship was further developed by Bruyat (1993), who proposed a definition based on two dimensions; novelty of the value created and resulting impact of the process on the individual. Morris (1998, p.17) later performed a literature analysis that resulted in 18 common definitional themes, adding risk-taking, managing resources, proactiveness, changemaking, ownership, strategy and responsibility to an already long list. Recently, further additions have been made. Shane and Venkataraman (2000, p.218) defined entrepreneurship as “the nexus of two phenomena: the presence of lucrative opportunities and the presence of enterprising individuals”. Entrepreneurship has also been viewed as a dynamic learning process (Cope, 2005; Rae, 2000). This has inspired a view of EE as focused on developing students’ entrepreneurial competencies (Bacigalupo et al., 2016; Blenker et al., 2011). Another recent definitional development has been to define entrepreneurship as a set of prescriptive methods that can guide entrepreneurial thought and action (Mansoori & Lackéus, 2019; Neck & Greene, 2011; Sarasvathy & Venkataraman, 2011). Figure 1 is an attempt to summarize literature on definitional perspectives of entrepreneurship in a succinct way. It will be used here as a foundation for the swan-based re-description.
Figure 1. A dispersive prism breaking entrepreneurship up into seven constituent spectral perspectives. Approximate times when the perspectives were proposed by definitionally leading scholars shown in brackets.
White swan 1: “Competitions for students is a great format”
Setting up a simulated or real competition with winners (and thus losers) is one of the most widespread and taken-for-granted practices among entrepreneurship educators on all levels of education (Brentnall, 2021). Common formats are mini-company fairs with a jury, idea pitching sessions, business plan competitions and money-making challenges. Competitions are claimed to foster student engagement, inspiration, creativity, business knowledge, problem-solving skills, a ‘can-do’ attitude, confidence and self-efficacy (Hanson et al., 2017). That could indeed be the case for a few lucky winners. However, it is far from evident that the many losing students also benefit accordingly (Oosterbeek et al., 2010). Many students also perceive competitions to be unmotivating or unfair (Brentnall et al., 2018).
From a definitional point of view, I find it difficult to see how student competitions accurately emulate entrepreneurship as a phenomenon. Whereas entrepreneurship is much about learning what might create value for customers in a new and innovative way, a student competition is instead often a vanity game of winning the superficial likings of an unpredictable jury. Whereas entrepreneurship is also much about establishing new markets, student competitions rather mimic how to win against fierce competition on a mature market with very similar offerings. For example, in the case of Junior Achievement, cookies, candles and cheap imported plastic merchandise dominate many fairs. Creative and iterative idea development over time together with potential customers then risks being replaced by a mentality that there is one single best packaging of standard goods or services that can win on Pitch Day or Exhibition Day. For many students, the envisioned ‘can-do’ attitude then risks being replaced by disappointment from losing or from working with uninteresting offerings (cf. Brentnall, 2023, p.347). Maybe competitions is not such a great format for students after all.
Black swan 1: From competing to cooperating
Let’s now imagine EE without competitions. When the jury is gone, more time and effort can be spent on cooperating more closely with those external people that students can try to create value for. The risk for setbacks and negative emotions will remain, but not due to some other team suddenly winning. Instead, every team can win. Winning is now defined as students succeeding in helping someone. Every team can thus also fail to create value, at least temporarily. However, this is not a losing situation, rather a learning situation. The only competition here is against the status quo of business-as-usual; external people not caring enough about what students try to accomplish for them. Students can thus also collaborate more freely with each other. Without a jury, no losers are assigned, only more or less resilient students when it comes to iterating, learning from feedback, trying again and persevering in trying to help others.
I have seen numerous examples of non-competitive EE, on all levels of education (see further in Lackéus, 2020, 2022). Students have campaigned to educate the public around societal issues, helped people with legal problems, designed garden sheds for people, done explainer videos, helped hospitalized children, produced radio shows, organized marketing events, helped elderly with IT equipment, and much more. Relieved from the jury, students can be entrepreneurial in myriad ways that more accurately align with the essence of entrepreneurship as a phenomenon. They iterate to create value for others locally or internationally, they innovate, they build strong relationships with external people and they learn to persevere. They do this in teams or as a whole class. Such value-creating experiences lead to increased motivation to learn, developed entrepreneurial competencies and also to deeper learning of a wide variety of non-entrepreneurship curricular knowledge and skills (Lackéus, 2020). Having studied such examples for years, my conclusion is that a competition is a rather poor surrogate for real entrepreneurial experiences. It serves teachers’ need to simplify pedagogical planning much more than it serves students’ need to learn in meaningful ways.
White swan 2: ”Creating a venture really motivates students”
Letting students create their own venture is another widespread practice in EE (Hägg & Gabrielsson, 2019). Some students set up a mini-venture that is later liquidated, others set up a full-venture with an intention to incorporate after graduation if it succeeds in helping customers (Smith et al., 2022). Student venture creation is a highly experiential approach that aims to produce emotionally strong learning of not only knowledge and skills, but also a mindset and deeply held beliefs that can foster entrepreneurial careers (Alsos et al., 2023). It rests on a largely taken-for-granted assumption that students are highly motivated by creating a new venture. As an example, Junior Achievement’s own investigations showed that “most students enjoy” their mini-venture creation programme (Johansen, 2018, p.37).
The definitional basis of student venture creation is Gartner’s organisation creation focus. He famously claimed that “Who is an entrepreneur?” is the wrong question (Gartner, 1989). Instead he asked us to look at what entrepreneurs do. “Entrepreneurs start businesses; therefore, the context of EE should be new venture creation (…) it is what defines and differentiates us as a teaching discipline” (Neck & Corbett, 2018, p.30). However, there is widespread consensus in Europe that a broader beyond-business view of EE is needed. It entails a wide variety of non-venture-creation based EE activities that students can learn from (cf. Gibb, 2008).
Black swan 2: From venture to value creation
Let’s now imagine EE without student venture creation. It is perhaps more of an off-white swan, at least outside of the US (Hägg & Gabrielsson, 2019). The truly black swan here is instead to falsify the claim that students get really motivated by starting a venture. What if it is rather the practical application of knowledge, the networking with like-minded equally self-selected people, or something else hitherto unknown, that they primarily enjoy? Impact assessment carried out so far in EE cannot really tell the difference (Brentnall, 2023, p.83). What we do know is that not all students enjoy starting a venture. For example, Junior Achievement asked their parents. Around 60% of students who joined their Company Programme were passionate about their mini-venture experience (Johansen, 2018, p.46). Considering that most students did not even sign up, venture creation is perhaps not so motivating for everyone after all. Many students prefer a more socially secure working life (Kvedaraitė, 2014) or a less corporate-focused entrepreneurial experience (Hertz, 2016).
I am myself a teacher in a venture creation program where I earlier was a student. I enjoyed the experience of creating a venture. A decade later, I started out my own doctoral journey assuming, like many others, that venture creation really motivates students. I did 55 interviews and collected 556 mini-survey responses from students creating full-ventures (Lackéus, 2020). However, it was not the venture creation that triggered their engagement and motivation, but rather a wide variety of other experiences, such as interacting with external stakeholders, creating value for them and getting powerful feedback from them (Lackéus, 2020, p.951). Starting and branding a new legal entity had little to do with their engagement levels. Today, I concur with professor Bengt Johannisson who claims that actors such as Junior Achievement are spreading a flawed view of entrepreneurship as being about self-oriented money-making, book-keeping, budgeting and financial calculus (Johannisson, 2016). Asking students to start a venture could in many cases be a complicated detour, compared to letting them create value for others in relational and interactive ways (Lackéus, 2020, p.959).
White swan 3: ”Student business ideas are great”
Letting students brainstorm business ideas in workshops is a widespread approach in EE (European Commission, 2008, p.28; Farrokhnia et al., 2022). Students are advised to think about moments of disharmony in their everyday lives, and then prototype solutions to address related problems (Thrane et al., 2016). However, there seems to be little if any empirical evidence available to suggest that the average student is capable of coming up with a high-quality business idea in this or in any other in-curricular way. A visit to any in-curricular student business fair would instead confirm fears that course-induced student ideas are in many cases not so interesting, but rather “recycled”, “similar”, “repetitive” and “predictable” (Jones & Penaluna, 2013, p.807). Some then claim that the quality of student ideas does not matter much for the quality of EE (Warhuus et al., 2017, p.241). Others have opted for a surrogate idea model, where students are instead invited to give birth to a new business based on someone else’s more mature idea (Lundqvist, 2014). Ideas can come from university technology transfer offices, independent innovators, researchers, alumni, other students, or from industry (Åsvoll & Jacobsen, 2012).
From a definitional point of view, letting students work with their own ideas aligns with Shane’s (2000) widespread definition of entrepreneurship as being about an individual seeing and acting upon an opportunity. In line with this, the European Commission defines EE as being about students working with their own ideas (Eurydice, 2016, p.74). The surrogate idea model has even been seen as not being a case of entrepreneurship, since students then work with other people’s ideas or “third person opportunities” (Blenker et al., 2012, p.424). These students are thus, according to Shane’s definition, not acting entrepreneurially.
Black swan 3: From business idea to passionate action
Let’s now imagine EE without students’ own business ideas as a starting point. This black swan is firmly rooted in viewing entrepreneurship as a set of processual methods that anyone can teach and learn (Sarasvathy & Venkataraman, 2011). Instead of trying to come up with an idea that predicts a desired future, students are advised to take action in the world based on their current means, passions and identities (Sarasvathy & Dew, 2005). Go out in the world, interact with many people around issues you care deeply about, make some of these people your partners or even friends, use means at hand to create interesting effects in the world. Skip the market research, just go out and talk to people through “hands on actual selling” (Sarasvathy & Dew, 2005, p.397). My own students label this approach “sell first, build later” (Odin & Ringqvist, 2022). It refocuses EE from being idea centric to being action and interaction centric. This represents a move away from defining entrepreneurship as an individual’s innate ability to spot a good idea (Kitching & Rouse, 2017; Sarasvathy & Venkataraman, 2011), to instead view good ideas as an outcome of a social process in the world outside the classroom, a creative and relational practice-based process of entrepreneuring (Thompson et al., 2020).
Examples of action-centric EE can be seen on all levels of education. The starting point could be the question “For whom could this knowledge be valuable today?”, such as in primary school teacher Maria Wiman’s classroom, where students are regularly challenged to educate and help the surrounding society around issues close to students’ hearts (Lackéus, 2022). Wiman also uses an emotional inventory technique, asking students “What makes you really angry?” to empower the entrepreneurial process. Other action-centric examples include students who as a class were asked to help a boy suffering from cerebral palsy through designing new technical solutions (Rodriguez-Falcon & Yoxall, 2010), students who educated younger students in various curricular matters (Surlemont, 2007), students who were asked to empathize with external people in a variety of ways (Bell, 2020) and students who were asked to create social value for marginalized communities (Venkatesh et al., 2023).
Many action-centric examples provide students with something to work on – a focusing device – in order to get them started. It can be a mature idea based on research, a challenge from an external partner, a piece of knowledge, a cause raised by an angry classmate, a problem in need for solutions, or a solution in need for problems it can solve. Students are then asked to act entrepreneurially – ideating, pitching, networking, resourcing, selling, prototyping or empathizing (Thompson et al., 2020). This is often supported by entrepreneurial methods such as design thinking, effectuation or lean startup (Mansoori & Lackéus, 2019).
White swan 4: ”Challenges and simulations are fun”
Challenges and business simulations are common in EE (Mwasalwiba, 2010). Compared to the “Long Form” venture creation approach which may last from months to a full academic year or more, the one-day challenges and the computer simulations spanning some weeks instead represent a “Short Form” approach to EE (Brentnall, 2023). They are presented as a fun and simple way to create engagement and to offer some level of entrepreneurial experience (Fox et al., 2018). Common challenges revolve around creating a product in a single day to be pitched for a Dragon’s Den type jury, egg drop challenges and money-making challenges with initial seed funding of $5 to $10 to be profit maximized in a week or so (Young, 2014). Many computer simulations let students run a virtual small business, such as a clothes store, and let them take financial decisions that impact the simulation (Fox et al., 2018).
While short form challenges and simulations can indeed be fun and create engagement, it is questionable if they also offer an entrepreneurial experience. As in the case of student competitions, I find it difficult to see how these challenges and games emulate entrepreneurship as a phenomenon. Little to no value is created for customers, students have little time to engage in real-world relational co-creation with others, and the potential to make a difference is largely absent. It seems to be more like entertainment than entrepreneurial learning. A recent study on computer simulations found them to lack realism, to rather focus on management and to lack key entrepreneurial components such as experiencing disruptive events, taking emotional action and learning from mistakes (Fox et al., 2018). Maybe challenges and business simulations are not such a good format after all, but instead cater more to the interests of a large and steadily growing Entrepreneurship Industry of actors who try to grow their often money-centric activities (Hunt & Kiefer, 2017). This represents a transactional view of EE that makes students believe that entrepreneurship is about winning prizes, transacting money and making as much money as quickly as possible.
Black swan 4: From transactional to relational EE
Let’s now imagine EE without short form challenges and business simulations. One way to replace a transactional focus on money, financial decisions and economic value creation for oneself could be to instead emphasize relations, co-creation with people outside class and attempts to create other kinds of value than economic. There are countless types of value that can be created in the world, and for countless others. Students can attempt to create social value, environmental value, enjoyment value, epistemic value, influence value, emotional value, cultural value, democratic value, historical value, and many other forms of value for others (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). It can be done in a short form manner. Many value types are free to create, since all it takes to create some one-off value is a brief moment of human interaction, real or digital. Students could deliver to others a moment of insight, of new knowledge, of amusement, of inspiration, of perspective or a moment of togetherness. That said, deeper relations involving co-creation do take time for the students to develop, so if there are ways to stretch out such entrepreneurial learning processes more in time, it is recommended. Such stretching also requires the teacher to lead the process, rather than the typical off-site event hosted by an external facilitator sourced from the Entrepreneurship Industry.
Many examples of relational value creation rely on professions being enacted from the classroom. Students can be asked to act as teachers, career counsellors, journalists, biologists, chefs, engineers, architects or caretakers (Lackéus, 2022). Preparations can be done in class, and the actual value-creating event can be done as homework documented through images and reflected upon through written text.
White swan 5: ”Guests and celebrities really inspire students”
Guest speakers and famous role models are widely used in EE (Raible & Williams-Middleton, 2021). Successful local entrepreneurs are often invited as guest speakers in the classroom, and case studies often draw upon celebrity entrepreneurs such as Gates, Jobs, Musk and Branson (Farny et al., 2016). Successful alumni are also frequently used as anecdotal proof of treatment effects in EE (Brentnall et al., 2023). Elevating certain individuals – be they local or global heroes – into divine icons, solitary geniuses or unique leaders is often done by EE teachers aiming to inspire their students, to show them what is possible, to convey an entrepreneurial identity they can adopt, and to make them believe more in themselves (Frederiksen, 2017; Warhuus et al., 2017). But for whom does this really work? While perhaps rewarding for some teachers and students, other students are instead alienated by these exemplars. They perceive it more like an aggressive, cult-like, masculinized, unrealistic and ultimately demotivating and uncomfortable portrayal of entrepreneurship (Jones, 2014; Raible & Williams-Middleton, 2021). Maybe guest speakers and celebrity entrepreneurs are not such a good format after all, but instead cause more damage than some teachers realize. How many students will end up thinking “entrepreneurship is definitely not for me”?
The definitional foundation for heroic inspirational entrepreneurs is McClelland’s 1960s traits view of successful entrepreneurs. This view faded in the late 1980s, following severe criticism (Landström et al., 2012). As focus turned from studying wealthy successful entrepreneurs to studying entrepreneurial contexts, it made less sense to search for evasive innate entrepreneurial traits (Hytti, 2005). Entrepreneurial heroes are not very representative of the entrepreneurial experience they are taken to represent, but rather reinforce a problematic skewed myth of the lone male white upper-class hero entrepreneur working in solitude (Farny et al., 2016; Ogbor, 2000).
Black swan 5: From hedonic heroism to prosocial teamwork
Let’s now imagine EE without guest speakers and celebrity entrepreneurs. How do we replace the hedonic pleasure of listening to entrepreneurial war stories? If the aim is to really inspire our students and invite them to an identity-shaping journey, we need to design our teaching in alignment with what we know about how people become more entrepreneurial (Lackéus, 2020) and how they assume an entrepreneurial identity (Williams Middleton, 2017). I know of no shortcuts here. Students need to be invited to a real entrepreneurial learning process of taking emotionally charged action from their hearts. While inspiring, it is also a process fraught with uncertainty and surprises for students and teachers.
There are, however, ways to make such a process more manageable for all involved. Let students work in teams around issues they care deeply about. Let them learn through applying their knowledge and skills to create real tangible value for external people they approach and get to know in person. Use reflective assessment to let them write about their own identity process. Let them reach out to local entrepreneurs asking for coaching, especially alumni from their own EE program. Alumni are more relatable and realistic role models (Raible & Williams-Middleton, 2021). If all of this is done, it will trigger powerful inspiration among students and coaches through powerful prosocial motivation. It is deeply inspirational to help others (Batson et al., 2008). This is also what entrepreneurship is all about according to Bruyat (1993), creating new value for others and learning from it all.
An example here is the small global community of full-venture creation programs that I am myself a part of, and where I learned so much about what motivates and inspires students. Many of the processes and mechanisms found at these programs can be emulated without having a full program, without letting students start a venture (Lackéus, 2022), and without relying on heroic guest speakers. For an introduction, go to a recent literature review (Smith et al., 2022) or to two multiple case studies (Holtan Lakså, 2021; Lackéus & Williams Middleton, 2015).
White swan 6: ”We admit the best and most engaged students”
Strategic selection is common in EE among both students and teachers (Liñán et al., 2018). Students carefully choose which courses and programs to attend or not. Teachers carefully describe and market their offerings to attract the right students. Many course descriptions lean on a stereotypic view of entrepreneurship, trying to attract competitive, confident and opportunistic students who might already have a unique business idea. The more action-based EE, the more stereotypical decriptions (Jones & Warhuus, 2018). This attracts some students and deters others, resulting in an often homogeneous group of likeminded students (Cochran, 2019), often from entrepreneurial families (Duval-Couetil et al., 2014). Among those discouraged are women, immigrants and students from poor backgrounds who feel that “this class is not for me” (Jones & Warhuus, 2018; Lyons & Zhang, 2017).
This powerful two-sided selection mechanism of inclusion/exclusion by teachers and attraction/discouragement of students makes it difficult to measure the mindset development effects of EE (Liñán et al., 2018). Did the students become more entrepreneurial as a treatment effect of EE, or were they admitted since they were already so entrepreneurial? Due to potential reversed causality, we may never know. Self-selection is a silent but immensely powerful force in society (Alvarez & Sachs, 2021). Entire regions prosper based on a “creative class” choosing to move there (Audretsch & Belitski, 2013). A famous example is Silicon Valley, attracting entrepreneurial people from all over the world. A related example is start-up accelerator TechStars, relying on elitist self-selection mechanisms accepting a mere 0,6% of applicants (Yu, 2020). Teachers who apply this strategy to attract already entrepreneurial students rely primarily on self-selection effects, not on treatment effects. This may trigger increased gender, class and race inequality in society, instead of mitigating it (Mijs, 2018). Maybe stereotypical and elitist marketing and recruitment of entrepreneurial students is not such a good idea after all.
Black swan 6: From exclusive club to inclusive treatment
Let’s now imagine EE without more or less subtle exclusion mechanisms. How can we wholeheartedly invite students from all classes, all genders and all cultures to enjoy the transformative treatment effects of really powerful EE? First of all, we need to let go of the murky old traits view of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial people come in all forms and shapes. Extrovert, neurotic, black, short, rich, agreeable, cautious, white, extravagant, introvert, long, poor, energetic, careless, you name it. The question is not who the EE student is, but how we can treat any person to become more resilient, inventive, resourceful, social, responsible, collaborative and motivated to build a better future for us all. Some of them might join EE to learn about becoming more creative, others might join because they like action-based pedagogy, yet others might want to start a business (Sá & Holt, 2019). Love all, serve all.
If we really want to treat inclusively, EE needs to be mandatory on all levels of education, from ABC to PhD. But then the stereotypical view of entrepreneurship will be inappropriate. The only EE approach I know of that could be served in a mandatory way for all is value creation pedagogy – letting students learn through creating value for others (Lackéus, 2020). Another route to inclusion is semantic. The words we use tend to delimit our lifeworld. What if the word “entrepreneurship” is one of the biggest hurdles to inclusive EE (Bridge, 2017)? Without it, our students could perhaps perceive EE as a more inclusive, relational and collaborative process of listening, co-creating and building trust. Students-as-givers who ask “How can I help?” instead of students-as takers asking “How can I profit?” (Lackéus, 2017).
A new semantic tool has been developed by the research group I am part of – the diamond model of what it means to be entrepreneurial. It is a model void of ventures, competitions, traits and profits. It instead defines being entrepreneurial as caring and daring to take emotional action in experiments to create new kinds of value for others, and to learn from the process in structured ways (Lackéus et al., 2020). The model has been used by Varberg municipality in Sweden to make employees more entrepreneurial at work. It has also inspired Swedish non-profit foundation Förebildarna in their training of youths in segregated areas to become more engaged in societal development issues. Such broad-based inclusive approaches do not preclude more narrow and exclusive EE formats at a later stage. Instead, they can be the front-end of a progression-based EE system that spans a decade or two, from preschool and school to college, university and adult education (see Lackéus, 2015, p.25). It takes many years to develop and nurture an entrepreneurial identity. Our education system needs to be designed accordingly.
Concluding remarks
I caught you knockin’ at my cellar door
I love you, baby, can I have some more?
Ooh, ooh, the damage done
Neil Young, “The needle and the damage done”
People deciding to engage, or not, in entrepreneurial careers do so mainly based on perceived fit between their own values, and the values associated with such careers (Jones & Warhuus, 2018). Therefore, how teachers present what it means to be entrepreneurial has a big impact on who, and how many, become entrepreneurial. Whenever I think of stereotypic EE, I think of Neil Young’s song. Ooh, ooh, the damage done when youths are made to believe that entrepreneurship is all about winning, competing, making money and becoming a lone brave hero with great business ideas. How many million young people, and not only women, immigrants and from poor families, have been made to think that “entrepreneurship is not for me” due to unreflective EE? Maybe stereotypic EE is the entrepreneurship teacher’s addiction, as if hailing the hero is their heroin, a quick and easy fix. Hytti (2018) has called the widespread one-size-fits-all pedagogy of much EE a problematic McDonaldization. She asks: would we give our own kids burgers every day?
This paper has aimed to illustrate that there are other ways to be entrepreneurial than taking up a lot of space, boasting, acting opportunistically, managing powerplays and being individualistic. One could for example be good at noticing others’ moods and needs, give people freedom and responsibility to co-create, be open, authentic, honest and context-sensitive (Kubberöd et al, 2021, p.1997). If one is successful in this, there will indeed come a time for starting a venture, dealing with financial transactions and developing one’s business idea further. What is proposed here is not to remove stereotypical aspects of EE, but to de-emphasize and delay the focus on them significantly as a way to open up EE to all. I tell my students to postpone starting a venture until it is illegal not to do so due to accounting laws, and instead try to focus on potential customers as human beings and try to cater to their needs. Instead of accepting homogenized EE in the shape of for example the dominant Junior Achievement Company Programme (Brentnall et al., 2023), we could try to “let a thousand flowers bloom” (Sá & Holt, 2019, p.133). This paper has aimed to inspire such gardening of EE through a detox exercise around stereotypical EE and its antithesis.
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