Entrepreneurship Education at a Crossroads: Towards a More Mature Teaching Field

摘要

As stated in numerous studies (see, for instance, Katz, 2003; Kuratko, 2005), entrepreneurship education is becoming more and more important everywhere in the world. At the same time, research works in the entrepreneurship field are growing and gaining increasing legitimacy within the scientific community. However limited research addresses educational or pedagogical issues in the field of entrepreneurship. Only a few researchers are focusing their energy, time and other resources on the subfield of entrepreneurship education. This situation is really problematic and detrimental to entrepreneurship both as a research object and as a teaching domain. In this article we attempt to offer a conceptual framework of entrepreneurship education inspired by education sciences. For each article of this special issue, we then underline its specific contribution to one or several educational questions which are at the heart of the framework. These selected articles bring a broad and significant contribution. They throw some light on other questions and research issues and we hope they could be attractive enough to encourage more entrepreneurship researchers to explore social entrepreneurship, institutional entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial competencies, entrepreneurial cognition and risk, and, finally entrepreneurial role models in the context of entrepreneurship education. We hope that future research in entrepreneurship education will bridge the gap between education sciences and entrepreneurship research on the one hand and the education and training world on the other.