Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education

1E&I Education: An Overview¹

This chapter defines the nature of entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as the limits and possibilities for teaching and learning the skills involved. It discusses some of the differences between traditional management education and training versus E&I-focused programs. It briefly argues the eternal question of whether entrepreneurship can be taught. It presents a framework for understanding the E&I education landscape and some of the processes and expected outputs of this educational system. It illustrates this approach with a case of a French University E&I education program. Finally, it presents the Collaborative Interactivity approach to teaching and learning E&I.

This section is designed to help professors to better understand some of the challenges of E&I teaching. It is highly theoretical and should be of little interest to students. If you are a student, we suggest you skip this section entirely and go straight to Chapter 2, about how to develop your entrepreneurship vision.

1.1. Defining entrepreneurship and innovation

The phenomenon of entrepreneurship lacks a single, universally accepted definition (Valerio et al. 2014). Kirzner (1999) defines it as a process of identifying and exploring (frequently unnoticed) profit opportunities. Klapper et al. (2010) describe it simply as the process of creating new wealth. In its narrowest definition, entrepreneurship is the process of converting ideas into products or services and then creating ...