Entrepreneurial learning: practice as a source for learning and business success

Entrepreneurship stands high on the political European agenda. Its meaning is twofold: entrepreneurship as a career opportunity, or as a competency. Following the statement made in Europe, national governments have defined an urgent need to stimulate entrepreneurial talent and motivate students to become entrepreneurs to start and develop new businesses that will generate employment and create economic and social wealth. Developing entrepreneurship education and training initiatives is one way of helping to achieve this goal. According to the European commission (2008), the teaching of entrepreneurship is not yet sufficiently integrated in higher education institutions' curricula. So the real challenge is to build campus-wide, inter-disciplinary approaches, making entrepreneurship education accessible to all students. At The Hague University of Applied Sciences we develop programs to stimulate entrepreneurship. The question is: to what extent do these programs contribute towards the development of entrepreneurial competencies, in other words: can entrepreneurship be taught? And furthermore, to what extent do the programs contribute to the success of new start-ups by students that followed our programs? Over the last five years time more than 200 students have taken part in three different electives developed in our centre. Some of the findings of our research are that students indeed develop entrepreneurial competencies (Harkema & Schout, 2008). This can partly be attributed to the pedagogical concept underlying the programs. The next step is to determine whether the acquired competencies developed in the program among students that have set up their own business, help them in their business and are accountable for their business success. In this paper we report on the preliminary findings of our research among a sample group of alumni that have followed different programs and set up their own business