Becoming An Entrepreneur

Competent entrepreneurial activity seems to be indispensable as it significantly affects the quality of people’s lives: Entrepreneurship behavior stimulates economic growth, social welfare and human cohesion, but it also upholds individual employability, as well as the autonomy of the stakeholders.

Thus, entrepreneurial activity is declared as one of the key competencies for lifelong learning.

During the last decade various entrepreneurship education programs were implemented across educational levels (secondary education, vocational education and training (VET)) and across academic disciplines, e.g. business administration, engineering, medicine, etc.

It includes – for developing entrepreneurial mindsets and behaviors – facets of economic literacy, risk taking acts and self-reliance feelings. But there is also a dark side of the story: We are confronted with a high mortality rate of start-ups within their first years.

Thus, it does not wonder that there are various upcoming calls for rigorous and sustainable evaluations on these programs and initiatives.

In addition, the increasing number of literature reviews and meta-analyses dealing with the impact of such entrepreneurial endeavors demonstrate various conceptual and methodological shortcomings.

With other words: the programs show a lack of clearly set learning goals; teaching methods are mainly named in a broad overarching way; the conceptualizations of observable evidences, regarding key entrepreneurial behavior as output, are often diffuse so that solid inferences and predictions are rare; the performed evaluation designs and methods are rather weak.

Course Curriculum