The development and promotion of entrepreneurship have been strategic objectives of both the EU and Member State policies for many years, and have grown in importance over time, with the European Commission and individual Member States adopting a range of measures. Key amongst these is the building of a stronger culture of entrepreneurship and 'entrepreneurial mindsets' of European citizens, particularly young people. Education and training are key drivers in this process. All students should have access to entrepreneurship education, which should be offered in all types and at all levels of education.

The aim is the understanding of the present state of entrepreneurship education and research and its future direction.

Entrepreneurship has emerged over the last two decades as arguably the most potent economic force the world has ever experienced. With that expansion has come a similar increase in the field of entrepreneurship education. The recent growth and development in the curricula and programs devoted to entrepreneurship and new-venture creation have been remarkable. The number of colleges and universities that offer courses related to entrepreneurship has grown from a handful in the 1970s to over 1,600 in 2005. In the midst of this huge expansion remains the challenge of complete academic legitimacy for entrepreneurship. While it can be argued that some legitimacy has been attained in the current state of entrepreneurship education, there are critical challenges that lie ahead. This article focuses on the trends and challenges in entrepreneurship education for the 21st century.

Policy makers in Europe and the United States believe that more entrepreneurship is required to reach higher levels of economic growth and innovation. Indeed, empirical research supports positive links between entrepreneurial activity and economic outcomes such as economic growth and innovation (Van Praag and Versloot, 2007). One of the most famous and accepted theories of economic growth underlying these empirical results supporting the economic importance of entrepreneurship has already been provided by Schumpeter (1911). Entrepreneurs seek profit opportunities and therefore introduce ‘new combinations’ or innovations (Van Praag, 1999) These new combinations are the prime endogenous cause of development in the economic system. New entrepreneurial combinations destroy the equilibrium in the economy and create a new equilibrium (creative destruction). Many endogenous growth theories that have been developed more recently are based on the Schumpeterian model of growth through creative destruction (e.g., Aghion and Howitt, 1998) and thus assign a central role to entrepreneurship for growth.

Innovativeness through the creation of new companies and new business areas are seen as key factors to achieve economic goals at the firm, the regional, and the national level. A restricting factor is the availability of competent individuals to manage projects and become entrepreneurs. Universities can address this need by increasing the motivation and competence of their graduates to become key persons in innovative and entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurship education has traditionally focused on teaching individuals, but many initiatives are increasingly becoming more action-oriented, emphasizing learning by doing. This paper presents a number of action-based activities at five Swedish universities. The cases show that entrepreneurship education focuses less on teaching individuals in a classroom setting and more on learning-by-doing activities in a group setting and a network context. Several initiatives have multiple goals, such as educating entrepreneurs, establishing new ventures, and commercializing university research. Implications for setting up an action-based entrepreneurship education program are provided.

This paper explains a new model of entrepreneurship education at university level. The early development of potential entrepreneurs through education, experience and nurturing may be one of the most important initiatives that business and other academic schools can pursue, because the role of entrepreneurship in creating new businesses can have a profound effect on the national economy.

Academic entrepreneurship by means of university spin-offs commercializes technological breakthroughs, which may otherwise remain unexploited. However, many universities face difficulties in creating spin-offs. This article adopts a science-based design approach to connect scholarly research with the pragmatics of effectively creating university spin-offs. This approach serves to link the practice of university spin-off creation, via design principles, to the scholarly knowledge in this area. As such, science-based design promotes the interplay between emergent and deliberate design processes. This framework is used to develop a set of design principles that are practice based as well as grounded in the existing body of research on university spin-offs. A case study of spin-off creation at a Dutch university illustrates the interplay between initial processes characterized by emergent design and the subsequent process that was more deliberate in nature. This case study also suggests there are two fundamentally different phases in building capacity for university spin-off creation. First, an infrastructure for spin-off creation (including a collaborative network of investors, managers and advisors) is developed that then enables support activities to individual spin-off ventures. This study concludes that to build and increase capacity for creating spin-offs, universities should do the following: (1) create university-wide awareness of entrepreneurship opportunities, stimulate the development of entrepreneurial ideas, and subsequently screen entrepreneurs and ideas by programs targeted at students and academic staff; (2) support start-up teams in composing and learning the right mix of venturing skills and knowledge by providing access to advice, coaching, and training; (3) help starters in obtaining access to resources and developing their social capital by creating a collaborative network organization of investors, managers, and advisors; (4) set clear and supportive rules and procedures that regulate the university spin-off process, enhance fair treatment of involved parties, and separate spin-off processes from academic research and teaching; and (5) shape a university culture that reinforces academic entrepreneurship by creating norms and exemplars that motivate entrepreneurial behavior. These and other results of this study illustrate how science-based design can connect scholarly research to the pragmatics of actually creating spin-offs in academic institutions.