For years in my view, entrepreneurship education has been framed too narrowly. In many institutions, it is still treated as a route into venture creation: write a business plan, build a pitch deck, test an idea, raise funding, launch. That matters, but it is no longer enough. If entrepreneurship education is defined only by the number of start-ups it produces, then it misses its wider purpose and undervalues its deepest contribution to students, institutions, employers and society.
A broader understanding is now well established in the literature. The European Commission’s EntreComp framework defines entrepreneurship as acting on opportunities and ideas to create value for others, and that value may be financial, social or cultural. It also makes clear that entrepreneurial competence applies across education, work and civic life, not only in the creation of a new venture. That is a significant shift. It means entrepreneurship education should not be confined to teaching students how to start companies. It should help them learn how to recognise opportunities, mobilise resources, solve problems, collaborate, adapt and create value in many contexts.
This matters because most students who encounter entrepreneurship education will not become founders immediately after graduation. Many will enter employment. A small number will work in large organisations, public institutions, charities, most will work in SMEs or family firms. Others will move between employment and self-employment across their lives. If entrepreneurship education is designed only for the minority who want to launch a venture now, it excludes the majority who still need entrepreneurial capability. A more effective model prepares students for intrapreneurship, innovation, leadership, employability and social impact, alongside venture creation.
The case for change is also pedagogical. Entrepreneurship education is strongest when it develops mindset as well as method. The literature increasingly presents it not simply as content about business, but as a way of thinking and acting. Recent reviews emphasise its role in building attitudes, skills and personal qualities such as initiative, creativity, resilience, adaptability and reflective judgment. These are not secondary outcomes. They are central outcomes. In a labour market shaped by automation, uncertainty and rapid change, these capabilities are arguably more durable than technical start-up knowledge alone. (ScienceDirect)
This is where many current programmes fall short. When entrepreneurship education becomes overly start-up centric, it often defaults to a familiar set of activities: business plans, venture finance, lean canvases and investor pitches. Those tools are useful, but they can reduce entrepreneurship to a commercial formula. They can also overemphasise venture mechanics at the expense of creativity, critical thinking, ethical reasoning and contextual awareness. Students may learn how to present a venture without fully understanding how entrepreneurial action works in communities, professions, public services or existing organisations.
A broader conception of entrepreneurship education would start from value creation rather than firm creation. That distinction is important. Value creation invites students to ask different questions. What problem is worth solving? For whom? In what context? What resources are available? What constraints matter? What does responsible action look like? These questions apply equally to a start-up founder, a nurse redesigning a patient pathway, a lecturer creating a new learning model, a graduate leading change inside a company, or a community organiser responding to a local challenge. EntreComp is helpful precisely because it frames entrepreneurship as a competence for life, not only for enterprise formation.
There is also a strong social argument for moving beyond start-up. Research published in Scientific Reports argues that well-designed entrepreneurial education contributes to sustainable communities by developing socially conscious entrepreneurs, strengthening communities and supporting longer-term job prospects. In that work, partnerships, curriculum design, alumni networks and sustainability-oriented structures are treated as key drivers. This pushes entrepreneurship education beyond private gain and towards public value. It aligns entrepreneurship with social innovation, sustainability and civic responsibility. That is especially important in higher education, where the purpose of learning should include contribution as well as commercialisation.
The field itself is also moving in this direction. A recent (Springer) state-of-the-art review argues that entrepreneurship education needs reshaping because the literature has often been fragmented and overly limited in scope. At the same time, pedagogical reviews show that experiential, interdisciplinary and reflective approaches are becoming more prominent. In other words, the debate is no longer whether entrepreneurship education should do more than produce founders. The debate is how quickly institutions can redesign provision to reflect that reality.
What should this look like in practice? First, entrepreneurship education should be embedded across ALL disciplines, not isolated in business schools. Engineers, artists, health professionals, educators and social scientists all need the capacity to identify opportunities and turn ideas into action. Second, the curriculum should include value based entrepreneurship (think social entrepreneurship but more impact-focused), intrapreneurship, innovation in employment settings, ethical decision-making and community problem-solving. Third, pedagogy should remain experiential, but with wider forms of application: live projects, challenge-based learning, design thinking, interdisciplinary teamwork, reflective journals and community partnerships. These approaches retain action and experimentation while expanding the meaning of entrepreneurial success.
Assessment must change too. If institutions only reward venture outputs, they will continue to teach to that narrow outcome. Students should also be assessed on opportunity recognition, problem framing, collaboration, resilience, ethical reasoning, stakeholder engagement and the ability to generate value in context. These are the capabilities employers increasingly need and societies increasingly depend upon.
Ultimately, entrepreneurship education should not be reduced to a pipeline for company formation. Start-ups remain one legitimate outcome, but they are not the only one, nor always the most important one. The real promise of entrepreneurship education is that it helps people become more capable of acting in uncertainty, creating value, initiating change and responding intelligently to complex problems. That makes it relevant not just to founders, but to graduates, employees, citizens and leaders. If universities want entrepreneurship education to remain credible, inclusive and future-facing, it must move decisively beyond business start-up.
References
European Commission, Joint Research Centre. (n.d.). EntreComp: The entrepreneurship competence framework. European Commission. (Joint Research Centre)
Passarelli, M., & Bongiorno, G. (2025). Is it the time to reshape entrepreneurship education? State-of-the-art and further perspectives. International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, 21, Article 61. (Springer)
Rodrigues, A. L. (2023). Entrepreneurship education pedagogical approaches in higher education. Education Sciences, 13(9), 940. (MDPI)
Suguna, M., Sreenivasan, A., Ravi, L., Devarajan, M., Suresh, M., Almazyad, A. S., Xiong, G., Ali, I., & Mohamed, A. W. (2024). Entrepreneurial education and its role in fostering sustainable communities. Scientific Reports, 14, Article 7588. (Nature)
Weber, S., Packard, M. D., & Bylund, P. L. (2022). Entrepreneurship education but not as we know it: Reflections on the relationship between critical pedagogy and entrepreneurship education. The International Journal of Management Education, 20(3), 100726. (ScienceDirect)
