Description
This detailed outline regarding using an intention uncertainty matrix to categorize entrepreneurship education offerings.
Paper ID #12122
Using an intention-uncertainty matrix to categorize entrepreneurship educa-
tion offerings
Mr. Jacob Dean Wheadon, Purdue University, West Lafayette
Jacob Wheadon is a PhD candidate in engineering education at Purdue University. His current research
focuses on understanding the bene?ts of entrepreneurship education for engineering students. He has a
BS degree in manufacturing engineering technology and an MS degree in technology and engineering
education from Brigham Young University. Before pursuing graduate studies, he worked as an industrial
engineer and earned the Six Sigma Black Belt from the American Society for Quality.
Dr. Nathalie Duval-Couetil, Purdue University, West Lafayette
Nathalie Duval-Couetil is the Director of the Certi?cate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program,
Associate Director of the Burton D. Morgan Center, and an Associate Professor in the Department of
Technology Leadership and Innovation at Purdue University. She is responsible for the launch and devel-
opment of the university’s multidisciplinary undergraduate entrepreneurship program, which has involved
over 5000 students from all majors since 2005. She has established entrepreneurship capstone, global en-
trepreneurship, and women and leadership courses and initiatives at both the undergraduate and graduate
levels. Prior to her work in academia, Nathalie spent several years in the ?eld of market research and
business strategy consulting in Europe and the United States with Booz Allen and Hamilton and Data and
Strategies Group. She received a BA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, an MBA from
Babson College, and MS and PhD degrees from Purdue University. She currently serves on the board of
the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship in the role of Vice President for
Research. She is also a Senior Research Advisor to the Stanford University Epicenter.
c American Society for Engineering Education, 2015
Using an intention-uncertainty matrix to categorize
entrepreneurship education offerings
Introduction
As the demand for entrepreneurial engineering students has increased in recent years, so has the
availability of entrepreneurship education for engineering students (Shartrand, Weilerstein,
Besterfield-Sacre, & Golding, 2010). As educators and researchers have sought to understand and
articulate the benefits of entrepreneurship education, it is clear that there is a lack of agreement on
what can be expected of an engineer who participates in such programs (Wheadon & Duval-couetil,
2014). For an entrepreneurial engineering program to be successful, do graduates need to start new
ventures, or just understand the process? Do they need to understand how to act entrepreneurially
within large engineering organizations? What if they start a business in a non-technical field? Has the
program failed if its graduates never really participate in any entrepreneurial endeavors, but leave
school with better professional skills and business acumen?
This paper argues for a broad definition of entrepreneurship programs that encompasses a wide range
of outcomes and pedagogies. It proposes a framework for categorizing entrepreneurship education
programs to create a common language among researchers, administrators, and students. With these
categorizations, entrepreneurship programs can identify their intended outcomes and align them with
the needs, experience levels, and career intentions of their students.
The proposed framework attempts to address and create a bridge between two major debates
concerning entrepreneurship education for engineers. It seeks to demonstrate and describe four major
types of entrepreneurial learning based on the degree to which venture creation is an expected
outcome of the learning, and the level of uncertainty in the value proposition of the opportunity.
Given that entrepreneurship takes on vastly different forms depending on these two dimensions, it is
little wonder that researchers and practitioners in the field confront difficulties in defining major
ideas, identifying best practices, or measuring and comparing programs’ success.
Rationale for the Framework: Two Great Debates
Among entrepreneurship education researchers and practitioners, there are varying definitions and
descriptions of most, if not all, of the central ideas in the field. Attempts to specifically define
entrepreneurship, innovation, or entrepreneurial mindset have been attempted by many researchers
and practitioners (Bilen, Kisenwether, Rzasa, & Wise, 2005; Ferguson & Ohland, 2012; Haynie,
Shepherd, Mosakowski, & Earley, 2010; Kleine & Yoder, 2011; Petersen, Jordan, & Radharamanan,
2012; Wang & Kleppe, 2001), but there appears to be a disconnect in the different approaches.
In comments made at academic conferences and summits concerning entrepreneurship education and
engineering, two major debates continually resurface despite the extensive work that has been done
to define entrepreneurship for engineering students. The first is whether or not entrepreneurship
education only concerns venture creation. Entrepreneurship is often equated with the starting of new
ventures, and many measures of the success of entrepreneurship programs are focused on students’
venture-creation activities after graduation (Rideout & Gray, 2013).
On the other side of the debate are educators and researchers who have documented many other
benefits to entrepreneurial engineering education. Some of these benefits include increased
engagement in engineering coursework (Ohland, Frillman, Zhang, Brawner, & Miller, 2004), broader
professional and business skills, including those required by ABET criterion 3 (Duval-Couetil,
Kisenwether, Tranquilo, & Wheadon, 2013; Ochs, Lennon, Watkins, & Mitchell, 2006; Wheadon &
Duval-couetil, 2014). In addition, intrapreneurship has become a greater focus as firms recognize the
need for employees who can find new opportunities and create value internally.
Much of the conflicting thought on entrepreneurship education could probably be attributed to this
debate. The course offerings, pedagogical approaches, and curricular content of entrepreneurship
programs will differ vastly based on whether its administrators fall on one side of the debate or the
other. The assumptions, measurement instruments, and methodological approaches used by
researchers will also vary substantially based on their position in this debate.
The other great debate in recent years is an outgrowth of new methods that have been introduced in
entrepreneurship education and practice. These methods, although existing in some form in business
literature for decades (Mintzberg & Waters, 1985), have been popularized more recently as “Lean
Startup” or “Lean Launchpad” methods (Blank & Dorf, 2012; Ries, 2011). The advent of these new
approaches has created turbulence among educators and researchers. Many have been quick to “go
lean” and discard methods that favor a more traditional planning approach, while others have argued
for the need to preserve some of the strategic and educational benefits of the analyses and processes
in business plan creation that can be translated into professional skills for engineers (Wheadon &
Duval-couetil, 2014). Rather than posing these two approaches against each other, researchers need
to bridge the divide between them and describe the types of scenarios in which each can be effective.
In one of the most popular and influential business books of the past two decades, Christensen (1997)
describes the two different types of innovations as disruptive and sustaining. He shows that
established firms tend to be very successful at finding, and capitalizing on, sustaining innovations.
These innovations are improvements upon earlier products along the dimensions that current
consumers value. They tend to be bigger, better, faster, flashier versions of previous products. They
are somewhat predictable and expensive, and are, therefore, easily targeted by large, well-funded
R&D labs in existing corporations. Disruptive innovations favor new entrants because they provide
value in new ways that are seen as less desirable by current customers but reach an unknown group
of non-consumers. Disruptive innovations happen in more uncertain circumstances and are more
easily created and exploited through open-ended, learning-focused, emergent strategies (Anthony,
Johnson, Sinfield, & Altman, 2008).
Emergent and deliberate strategies are another area of research that differentiates along the
dimension of uncertainty. Mintzberg & Waters (1985) described companies that used these different
strategies and demonstrated their use depending on levels of uncertainty in the environment. In a
purely deliberate strategy the intended outcome is precisely known, the environment is static, and the
process required to move from the current state to the success state are clear. In a purely emergent
strategy, the end result is unknown, the environment is dynamic and unpredictable, and little is
known about the direction that should be taken. In deliberate strategy, the focus is execution; in
emergent, the focus is adaptation through learning experience in the unknown environment.
Mintzberg & Waters (1985) stress the need for managers to be aware of these patterns and to employ
the correct strategies based on their situations.
Research on innovative entrepreneurs’ behaviors has also highlighted the need to act in different
ways based on the level of uncertainty in the business (Dyer, Gregersen, & Christensen, 2008). It
identifies behaviors such as questioning, observing, experimenting and idea networking, and finds
that in the early unpredictable phase of a company’s life, more entrepreneurial behaviors are needed.
As the company begins to find success and scale up, however, a different set of skills is needed.
These management skills favor planning, execution, prediction, forecasting, analysis of data, and
optimization. This research suggests that it is valuable to create partnerships between people that lean
toward each type of behavior, citing the example of Michael Dell’s partnership with Kevin Rollins.
Dell, the innovator, and Rollins, the manager, have often been at odds because of their different
approaches, but have served to balance each other out and provide leadership that could address
different types of problems at different stages of their company’s growth.
The theory of effectuation describes different logic types that are employed by entrepreneurs and
managers depending on the level of uncertainty (Sarasvathy, 2008). This work shows how
entrepreneurs navigate uncertainty and ambiguity by using effectual thinking processes rather than
predictive ones. Using effectual logic, an entrepreneur would focus on what they can do with their
given means, rather than having a given goal and seeking the means to attain it. This ties closely to
Mintzberg & Waters (1985) work on strategy by showing the underlying cognition of emergent
strategy. By starting with the means at hand, an entrepreneur can be free to follow an emergent
strategy. Using predictive logic, on the other hand, forces a person to identify a goal and predict what
will be needed to reach it.
Dimension of
differentiation
Author Low uncertainty High uncertainty
Type of
innovation
Christensen Sustaining innovation Disruptive innovation
Behavior Dyer, Gregerson,
Christensen
Manager behaviors Innovator behaviors
Strategy Mintzberg and
Waters
Deliberate strategy (traditional
business planning)
Emergent strategy
(lean methods)
Logic
Sarasvathy Predictive logic Effectual logic
These different perspectives on entrepreneurial action all point to the fact that under circumstances of
differing levels of uncertainty, different methods are required. It stands to reason then, that
entrepreneurship education will take on different forms depending on the level of uncertainty present.
This demonstrates the necessity of categorizing educational offerings according to the level of
uncertainty.
Given the ideological division that these two debates represent, it is critical that, as a field,
entrepreneurship education is able to reconcile the differences between the different sides. Rather
than arguing for why one side or the other represents “true entrepreneurship”, the authors of this
paper contend that many, if not all, of these activities fall under the umbrella of entrepreneurship
education.
The Entrepreneurial Intention-Uncertainty Matrix
In order to provide a better alternative for defining and discussing entrepreneurship education and its
attendant activities, a framework for categorizing entrepreneurial learning has been developed. It
categorizes entrepreneurial learning along two dimensions: Intention to start a new venture, and the
level of uncertainty of the value proposition. By arranging entrepreneurial learning along the same
dimensions that are the sources of the field’s major debates, it is anticipated that educators and
researchers can see where their programs fit, understand the difference between their program and
others, and recognize that entrepreneurship can be manifested in multiple ways.
Because of the difference in intentions and strategies involved in each part of the matrix, future
researchers will have a foundation upon which they can situate their research. Researchers will not be
looking for the methods that best teach entrepreneurship because they will see that methods will
differ greatly depending on the intent and strategy needed in each type. Instead, research can be
focused on what methods and content are most useful in different types of entrepreneurial learning.
The two dimensions create four quadrants into which entrepreneurial learning can be categorized.
The matrix is shown in Table 1. The quadrants in the matrix contain examples of the types of
programs that would target each type of entrepreneurial learning. The following sections will
describe the rationale for using the 2 dimensions, and then discuss the quadrants and the types of
educational programs or offerings that typify each.
Table 1. Categorized emphases in entrepreneurship education goals
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
Traditional business
skills
Small business
creation
High Intrapreneurship Tech startups
Dimension 1: Intention to start new ventures
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Categorizing along intention to start ventures helps to differentiate between intensive startup
experiences where students are guided in actively creating a new venture versus more skills-based
experiences where students learn about creativity, innovation, and business skills without actually
starting a venture. Prior research has shown that students enroll in entrepreneurship for a variety of
reasons. These include seeking guidance on how to proceed with a venture or product idea, broader
career options, general interest in the topic, desire to see if they could make it as an entrepreneur,
earning additional educational credentials, and desire to take business classes (Duval-Couetil, Gotch,
& Yi, 2014). Students who have high intentions to start ventures, but find themselves in more general
skill-building courses, may be frustrated by the lack of specific instructions on creating an
organization. On the other hand, students who are interested in entrepreneurship, but do not currently
have the ideas or the confidence to start a venture may be bored by some elements of business
creation, and want more opportunities to gain transferable skills.
Instruction that focuses on low intention to start ventures will emphasize the development of
entrepreneurial skills, behaviors, and thinking patterns without pushing students to actually start a
firm or create a startup. By focusing on skills, such a program could prevent students from wasting
time creating projections, validating with customers, or prototyping an idea they do not really care
about or wish to pursue. It could also spend more time teaching students intrapreneurship concepts
that will help them to find, create, and capitalize on new opportunities within existing organizations.
Entrepreneurial learning on the other end of this dimension focuses on venture creation. This type of
instruction should guide students to find and validate an idea, and then iteratively test and improve
their offering. Students should also learn legal, accounting, and other details that will be necessary as
they start their venture. It can also provide students with opportunities to find and raise capital to
fund their new enterprise.
Differentiating along intent to start ventures is useful for researchers and practitioners of
entrepreneurship education. For researchers, it is important to differentiate because it changes the
assumptions and expected outcomes that underlie their work. The kinds of questions that researchers
ask, and the methods that they employ, will change drastically depending on whether learning is
focused on firm creation. If a program or course is taught with high intention to create a new venture,
measuring the success of such a course will be fairly straightforward: It will depend on how many
students go on to create businesses and their economic impact. In a low intention scenario, the
measures will not be as simple. Rather, they may focus on measuring students’ ability to handle
uncertainty, knowledge of business processes and strategy, ability to generate novel solutions to a
problem, or communication skills.
There is also value in this type of categorization for administrators and educators. By clearly
articulating this difference, programs and courses can more easily align the intentions of the program,
the instructors, the assessments, and the students. This will prevent students with intentions to start
ventures being disappointed by a lack of depth in a course focused on building entrepreneurial skills
or mindset. It will also help students who do not already have ideas for new ventures to find courses
and programs that will teach them to think and act entrepreneurially, even when they intend to work
in an existing organization. With clear differentiation between these types of offerings, students can
make better choices about the courses and programs in which they participate and enroll in the
activities that best meet their needs.
Dimension 2: Level of uncertainty
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
High
As stated previously, various strands of research on entrepreneurship and innovation point to the fact
that entrepreneurs tend to use certain strategic patterns more than non-entrepreneurs. Although these
researchers study different facets of the entrepreneurial experience, their findings indicate definite
patterns. It is apparent that predictable scenarios require different approaches from highly uncertain
ones. The level of uncertainty or predictability governs the type of strategy that should be employed,
which will dramatically affect the content to be taught and the methodological approach of the
instructor.
Low intention/low uncertainty
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
Traditional business
skills
High
The top left quadrant of the matrix represents low intention to start new ventures and low levels of
uncertainty. The types of entrepreneurial activities in this quadrant will be focused on general
business acumen and knowledge. These will not necessarily be focused on the creation of novel ideas
or entities, but will equip students with the business knowhow that is required to be an effective part
of a business organization. Traditionally, engineering students have been able to access these types of
offerings through business schools or engineering management programs, but they are more recently
receiving them through entrepreneurship programs.
Although this category seems less exciting or novel than some of the others, it can be an important
element of an engineering student’s educational experience. It is becoming increasingly important for
engineering students to be conversant in business language and proficient in management skills as
they are increasingly being employed in non-industrial, or non-technical, positions (Wei, 2005).
Better understanding of the overall business has been a noted benefit of graduates of engineering and
entrepreneurship programs (Duval-Couetil & Wheadon, 2013).
Low intention/high uncertainty
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
Traditional business
skills
High Intrapreneurship
The bottom left quadrant represents low intention to start new ventures, but high uncertainty in the
value proposition. This type of educational offering will prepare students to work within existing
organizations, but to help those organizations to find and exploit new opportunities. They will need
to be well-trained in entrepreneurial thinking and behavior and understand the types of innovations
that will provide the organization with new growth.
These types of programs or courses are not often clearly defined. Instead, intrapreneurship is often
considered to be a side-effect of teaching entrepreneurship to students who do not go on to create
firms. There are obvious similarities between ways that entrepreneurs create new ventures and
intrapreneurs create new value within firms, but the current lack of focused instruction on
intrapreneurship ignores the differences between them. The two types differ greatly in terms
deadlines, fundraising, available resources, existing constraints, and many others. Although
Christensen's (1997) seminal work describes the advantages that smaller firms have in pursuing
disruptive innovations, little work has been done to describe the different skills needed to pursue
them in existing versus new enterprises.
This is especially unfortunate considering the increasing demand in industry for engineering students
who think and solve problems entrepreneurially. More and more, existing corporations recognize the
need for employees who can create new opportunities for growth. By learning about emergent
strategy, effectual logic, and how to capitalize on disruptive innovations, students will be prepared to
make decisions and add value in increasingly turbulent environments and unpredictable corporate
scenarios.
High intention/low uncertainty
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
Traditional business
skills programs
Small business
creation
High Intrapreneurship
The top right quadrant represents educational offerings with high intention to start ventures and low
levels of uncertainty. Entrepreneurial activity in this space will appear similar to small business
creation and management programs. These offerings will equip students with the skills and
knowledge required to create a small business in which the value proposition and business model are
already proven. Instruction focuses on the learning how to analyze an existing local market to see if
another business of their type could be profitable.
For engineering students, this could be forming a local structural engineering firm to bid on design
and building projects, or opening a small manufacturing shop to provide parts for a nearby auto
manufacturer. It is not a novel idea, but is valuable to customers and can provide employment for the
students. The skills needed in this quadrant are different from the others and will focus on the details
of small business creation such as legal, payroll, liability, cost estimation, bidding, negotiation, and
market analysis. They may also include specialized technical training such as how to practically use
engineering principles to create detailed structural plans for an office building.
High intention/high uncertainty
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
Traditional business
skills
Small business
creation
High Intrapreneurship Tech startups
The last quadrant is most commonly associated with modern technology startups. It consists of high
intention to start a new venture and high uncertainty. In this space are offerings that focus on
teaching students how to create and find new opportunities and create new ventures around the new
offerings. These are considered areas of high uncertainty due to the novelty of the students’
innovation. If it is a truly innovative offering, there will be very little knowledge about its ability to
create new markets or the willingness of customers to pay for it. This is why it is important for these
activities to promote emergent strategies and effectual thinking patterns.
In comparison with activity in the bottom left (intrapreneurship) quadrant, this quadrant should be
more focused on providing students with understanding of new venture creation. In addition to
learning to think and act in uncertain circumstances, students in this type of offering should learn
how to raise capital, what types of capital they should seek at different stages, how to price offerings,
creating an organization, and hiring the right people, among others.
This type of offering is often found in intensive startup experiences or entrepreneurial accelerators.
Such programs are natural homes for Lean Launchpad or Lean Startup programs due to their focus
on venture creation and quick, iterative validation and improvement of concepts.
Implications
Categorizing entrepreneurship education offerings as outlined in this paper could have positive
impacts on stakeholders. Researchers, program administrators, and students can benefit from
differentiating between activities with varying intentions and levels of uncertainty.
For researchers
Researchers in entrepreneurial engineering education have had great difficulty in creating
consensus around the definitions, intentions, and outcomes of entrepreneurship education. Given
the vast differences between offerings described in this paper, it is no wonder that such is the
case. With this type of categorization available, researchers will be able to move past definitional
boundary work by acknowledging different types of entrepreneurship, focus on the best practices
in each type, and situate their research in relation to others’.
Debates over definitions of entrepreneurship and what really counts as entrepreneurship have
been repeated for decades. Rather than fighting for one definition or another, it is much simpler
to make entrepreneurship an inclusive term that includes many different subtypes and categories.
By differentiating entrepreneurship education offerings as this paper has, researchers can move
from debating what counts as entrepreneurship education to what works in different types of
entrepreneurship education.
Once the differences between the types of educational offerings are understood, it will be easier
to identify and disseminate best practices. Without categories, researchers find that what works
in one program does not work as well in another. They find it impossible to compare programs
with each other, or to get beyond anecdotal reports of successes and failures that they hope will
benefit others. Armed with meaningful categories, researchers can find different best practices
for different types of offerings. They may find pedagogical methods and curricular tools that will
be beneficial to some types of entrepreneurial education and not others, but if they have good
categories, they will be able to understand why a given method works in one situation and not
another.
As in many new fields of inquiry, entrepreneurship education research has often failed to create
coherent understanding among researchers. Many research projects in entrepreneurship
education for engineers have little grounding in prior work and little integration of similar work
from other fields. It is not uncommon for researchers to fail to mention important work in
cognitive science, entrepreneurial cognition, educational measurement theory, engineering
cognition, or behavioral economics, any of which could impact the way that questions and
studies are framed. For these reasons, it is important that researchers in the field have ways to
situate their research in relation to others. The framework in this paper can be an important part
of developing a shared language that researchers can use to relate their ideas to others in the
field, even if some of those others are situated on the opposite end of the dimensions outlined.
For administrators and students
A major benefit of this type of categorization is the ability for administrators of programs to
clearly articulate the intents and outcomes of their programs. Instead of saying that a program
equips engineering students with entrepreneurship skills, and administrator can describe their
programs’ focus within entrepreneurship. Articulating the focus of a program or course is
important because it helps to align objectives across multiple courses and instructors within a
program, it gives prospective students a clearer view of what they are getting into, and it helps
administrators describe what an engineering entrepreneurship program at their institution is (and
what it is not).
Alignment of objectives is an important element of effective education practice. In any course,
the course content, assessments, and pedagogical practices should be aligned to improve learning
and to have valid understanding of the students’ progress. This is more difficult across a whole
program with multiple instructors and course offerings, but it becomes almost impossible if the
outcomes are not clearly defined. The multiple definitions of entrepreneurship create many more
opportunities for confusion and misalignment across programs. By articulating the particular
type of entrepreneurship education being offered, administrators can better ensure that
coursework across the program reflects the desired outcome of the institution or department.
Having clearly articulated outcomes and intentions for offerings also helps to align students’
goals and desires with their educational experiences. A student who has a commercializable idea
and needs guidance to bring it to market would be very disappointed with a course situated on
the low intention end of the matrix. A student who intends to work for a large corporation may
find that a Lean Launchpad course would push them to go through the motions of creating a
company, when they really hoped to gain project management skills or learn how different parts
of a corporation interact and relate to each other. By better describing the types of offerings
available, students will be able to choose courses that are aligned with their needs, intentions,
and entrepreneurial readiness.
In addition to better describing offerings to others within the program and prospective students,
articulating the different intents of different entrepreneurship types can benefit the adoption of
these types of programs. As entrepreneurship education initiatives grow and develop in many
universities, there are a number of obstacles to wider adoption. One such obstacle is pushback
from other engineering faculty who do not think that entrepreneurship education has much to do
with teaching students to be good engineers in their field. This can be explained by a lack of
clarity concerning what entrepreneurship is. If a civil engineering professor sees
entrepreneurship as focused on making new social smartphone apps, it makes sense that
entrepreneurship would seem irrelevant. By describing the type of entrepreneurship being
practiced, such as one that equips students with thinking skills that help them to navigate goal
ambiguity and uncertainty, it is possible that resistant faculty may gain better understanding of
the benefits of entrepreneurship education for their students.
Practical Application
For the sake of clarity, this paper has discussed the different types of entrepreneurship in stark
contrast to each other. In reality, these categories are not all-or-nothing, black or white. Real
engineering, social, and economic problems are neither completely predictable nor completely
unknown. All action to create new value will use elements of predictive and effectual logic. To
best prepare students, instruction needs to provide them with opportunities to practice both types
of strategies.
Additionally, educational offerings rarely focus solely on skill development or on venture
creation. A course that focuses on venture creation will need to help students develop new skills,
and a skills-focused course may teach skills in the context of venture creation.
Rather than choosing one type or the other, administrators of programs should use this matrix to
determine and communicate where their focus lies. There may be institutions that prefer to
specialize in one quadrant of the matrix over others. Others may find that they want to cover all
aspects of entrepreneurship, but have different courses that cover each part of the matrix. It is not
important that programs become “purists” in one form or another of entrepreneurial education,
but programs should be able to articulate where they fall on the spectra that make up both
dimensions of the matrix. By clearly stating their intended focus, programs can better align their
instruction and assessments, researchers can better situate their findings, and students can make
more informed choices about the courses and programs in which they enroll.
Conclusion
It is clear that the emerging field of study concerning entrepreneurship education needs more
organization. It needs a framework in which multiple definitions of entrepreneurial education
activity can be situated and related to other work in the field. This paper proposes a scheme for
categorizing educational offerings based on the intention to start new ventures and the level of
uncertainty in the value proposition. By so doing, this work is intended to create a broader
definition of entrepreneurship education and create meaningful categories across which
researchers, practitioners, and students can have clearer understanding and consensus concerning
the benefits of, and best methods for, entrepreneurship education for engineers.
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doc_408610988.pdf
This detailed outline regarding using an intention uncertainty matrix to categorize entrepreneurship education offerings.
Paper ID #12122
Using an intention-uncertainty matrix to categorize entrepreneurship educa-
tion offerings
Mr. Jacob Dean Wheadon, Purdue University, West Lafayette
Jacob Wheadon is a PhD candidate in engineering education at Purdue University. His current research
focuses on understanding the bene?ts of entrepreneurship education for engineering students. He has a
BS degree in manufacturing engineering technology and an MS degree in technology and engineering
education from Brigham Young University. Before pursuing graduate studies, he worked as an industrial
engineer and earned the Six Sigma Black Belt from the American Society for Quality.
Dr. Nathalie Duval-Couetil, Purdue University, West Lafayette
Nathalie Duval-Couetil is the Director of the Certi?cate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program,
Associate Director of the Burton D. Morgan Center, and an Associate Professor in the Department of
Technology Leadership and Innovation at Purdue University. She is responsible for the launch and devel-
opment of the university’s multidisciplinary undergraduate entrepreneurship program, which has involved
over 5000 students from all majors since 2005. She has established entrepreneurship capstone, global en-
trepreneurship, and women and leadership courses and initiatives at both the undergraduate and graduate
levels. Prior to her work in academia, Nathalie spent several years in the ?eld of market research and
business strategy consulting in Europe and the United States with Booz Allen and Hamilton and Data and
Strategies Group. She received a BA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, an MBA from
Babson College, and MS and PhD degrees from Purdue University. She currently serves on the board of
the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship in the role of Vice President for
Research. She is also a Senior Research Advisor to the Stanford University Epicenter.
c American Society for Engineering Education, 2015
Using an intention-uncertainty matrix to categorize
entrepreneurship education offerings
Introduction
As the demand for entrepreneurial engineering students has increased in recent years, so has the
availability of entrepreneurship education for engineering students (Shartrand, Weilerstein,
Besterfield-Sacre, & Golding, 2010). As educators and researchers have sought to understand and
articulate the benefits of entrepreneurship education, it is clear that there is a lack of agreement on
what can be expected of an engineer who participates in such programs (Wheadon & Duval-couetil,
2014). For an entrepreneurial engineering program to be successful, do graduates need to start new
ventures, or just understand the process? Do they need to understand how to act entrepreneurially
within large engineering organizations? What if they start a business in a non-technical field? Has the
program failed if its graduates never really participate in any entrepreneurial endeavors, but leave
school with better professional skills and business acumen?
This paper argues for a broad definition of entrepreneurship programs that encompasses a wide range
of outcomes and pedagogies. It proposes a framework for categorizing entrepreneurship education
programs to create a common language among researchers, administrators, and students. With these
categorizations, entrepreneurship programs can identify their intended outcomes and align them with
the needs, experience levels, and career intentions of their students.
The proposed framework attempts to address and create a bridge between two major debates
concerning entrepreneurship education for engineers. It seeks to demonstrate and describe four major
types of entrepreneurial learning based on the degree to which venture creation is an expected
outcome of the learning, and the level of uncertainty in the value proposition of the opportunity.
Given that entrepreneurship takes on vastly different forms depending on these two dimensions, it is
little wonder that researchers and practitioners in the field confront difficulties in defining major
ideas, identifying best practices, or measuring and comparing programs’ success.
Rationale for the Framework: Two Great Debates
Among entrepreneurship education researchers and practitioners, there are varying definitions and
descriptions of most, if not all, of the central ideas in the field. Attempts to specifically define
entrepreneurship, innovation, or entrepreneurial mindset have been attempted by many researchers
and practitioners (Bilen, Kisenwether, Rzasa, & Wise, 2005; Ferguson & Ohland, 2012; Haynie,
Shepherd, Mosakowski, & Earley, 2010; Kleine & Yoder, 2011; Petersen, Jordan, & Radharamanan,
2012; Wang & Kleppe, 2001), but there appears to be a disconnect in the different approaches.
In comments made at academic conferences and summits concerning entrepreneurship education and
engineering, two major debates continually resurface despite the extensive work that has been done
to define entrepreneurship for engineering students. The first is whether or not entrepreneurship
education only concerns venture creation. Entrepreneurship is often equated with the starting of new
ventures, and many measures of the success of entrepreneurship programs are focused on students’
venture-creation activities after graduation (Rideout & Gray, 2013).
On the other side of the debate are educators and researchers who have documented many other
benefits to entrepreneurial engineering education. Some of these benefits include increased
engagement in engineering coursework (Ohland, Frillman, Zhang, Brawner, & Miller, 2004), broader
professional and business skills, including those required by ABET criterion 3 (Duval-Couetil,
Kisenwether, Tranquilo, & Wheadon, 2013; Ochs, Lennon, Watkins, & Mitchell, 2006; Wheadon &
Duval-couetil, 2014). In addition, intrapreneurship has become a greater focus as firms recognize the
need for employees who can find new opportunities and create value internally.
Much of the conflicting thought on entrepreneurship education could probably be attributed to this
debate. The course offerings, pedagogical approaches, and curricular content of entrepreneurship
programs will differ vastly based on whether its administrators fall on one side of the debate or the
other. The assumptions, measurement instruments, and methodological approaches used by
researchers will also vary substantially based on their position in this debate.
The other great debate in recent years is an outgrowth of new methods that have been introduced in
entrepreneurship education and practice. These methods, although existing in some form in business
literature for decades (Mintzberg & Waters, 1985), have been popularized more recently as “Lean
Startup” or “Lean Launchpad” methods (Blank & Dorf, 2012; Ries, 2011). The advent of these new
approaches has created turbulence among educators and researchers. Many have been quick to “go
lean” and discard methods that favor a more traditional planning approach, while others have argued
for the need to preserve some of the strategic and educational benefits of the analyses and processes
in business plan creation that can be translated into professional skills for engineers (Wheadon &
Duval-couetil, 2014). Rather than posing these two approaches against each other, researchers need
to bridge the divide between them and describe the types of scenarios in which each can be effective.
In one of the most popular and influential business books of the past two decades, Christensen (1997)
describes the two different types of innovations as disruptive and sustaining. He shows that
established firms tend to be very successful at finding, and capitalizing on, sustaining innovations.
These innovations are improvements upon earlier products along the dimensions that current
consumers value. They tend to be bigger, better, faster, flashier versions of previous products. They
are somewhat predictable and expensive, and are, therefore, easily targeted by large, well-funded
R&D labs in existing corporations. Disruptive innovations favor new entrants because they provide
value in new ways that are seen as less desirable by current customers but reach an unknown group
of non-consumers. Disruptive innovations happen in more uncertain circumstances and are more
easily created and exploited through open-ended, learning-focused, emergent strategies (Anthony,
Johnson, Sinfield, & Altman, 2008).
Emergent and deliberate strategies are another area of research that differentiates along the
dimension of uncertainty. Mintzberg & Waters (1985) described companies that used these different
strategies and demonstrated their use depending on levels of uncertainty in the environment. In a
purely deliberate strategy the intended outcome is precisely known, the environment is static, and the
process required to move from the current state to the success state are clear. In a purely emergent
strategy, the end result is unknown, the environment is dynamic and unpredictable, and little is
known about the direction that should be taken. In deliberate strategy, the focus is execution; in
emergent, the focus is adaptation through learning experience in the unknown environment.
Mintzberg & Waters (1985) stress the need for managers to be aware of these patterns and to employ
the correct strategies based on their situations.
Research on innovative entrepreneurs’ behaviors has also highlighted the need to act in different
ways based on the level of uncertainty in the business (Dyer, Gregersen, & Christensen, 2008). It
identifies behaviors such as questioning, observing, experimenting and idea networking, and finds
that in the early unpredictable phase of a company’s life, more entrepreneurial behaviors are needed.
As the company begins to find success and scale up, however, a different set of skills is needed.
These management skills favor planning, execution, prediction, forecasting, analysis of data, and
optimization. This research suggests that it is valuable to create partnerships between people that lean
toward each type of behavior, citing the example of Michael Dell’s partnership with Kevin Rollins.
Dell, the innovator, and Rollins, the manager, have often been at odds because of their different
approaches, but have served to balance each other out and provide leadership that could address
different types of problems at different stages of their company’s growth.
The theory of effectuation describes different logic types that are employed by entrepreneurs and
managers depending on the level of uncertainty (Sarasvathy, 2008). This work shows how
entrepreneurs navigate uncertainty and ambiguity by using effectual thinking processes rather than
predictive ones. Using effectual logic, an entrepreneur would focus on what they can do with their
given means, rather than having a given goal and seeking the means to attain it. This ties closely to
Mintzberg & Waters (1985) work on strategy by showing the underlying cognition of emergent
strategy. By starting with the means at hand, an entrepreneur can be free to follow an emergent
strategy. Using predictive logic, on the other hand, forces a person to identify a goal and predict what
will be needed to reach it.
Dimension of
differentiation
Author Low uncertainty High uncertainty
Type of
innovation
Christensen Sustaining innovation Disruptive innovation
Behavior Dyer, Gregerson,
Christensen
Manager behaviors Innovator behaviors
Strategy Mintzberg and
Waters
Deliberate strategy (traditional
business planning)
Emergent strategy
(lean methods)
Logic
Sarasvathy Predictive logic Effectual logic
These different perspectives on entrepreneurial action all point to the fact that under circumstances of
differing levels of uncertainty, different methods are required. It stands to reason then, that
entrepreneurship education will take on different forms depending on the level of uncertainty present.
This demonstrates the necessity of categorizing educational offerings according to the level of
uncertainty.
Given the ideological division that these two debates represent, it is critical that, as a field,
entrepreneurship education is able to reconcile the differences between the different sides. Rather
than arguing for why one side or the other represents “true entrepreneurship”, the authors of this
paper contend that many, if not all, of these activities fall under the umbrella of entrepreneurship
education.
The Entrepreneurial Intention-Uncertainty Matrix
In order to provide a better alternative for defining and discussing entrepreneurship education and its
attendant activities, a framework for categorizing entrepreneurial learning has been developed. It
categorizes entrepreneurial learning along two dimensions: Intention to start a new venture, and the
level of uncertainty of the value proposition. By arranging entrepreneurial learning along the same
dimensions that are the sources of the field’s major debates, it is anticipated that educators and
researchers can see where their programs fit, understand the difference between their program and
others, and recognize that entrepreneurship can be manifested in multiple ways.
Because of the difference in intentions and strategies involved in each part of the matrix, future
researchers will have a foundation upon which they can situate their research. Researchers will not be
looking for the methods that best teach entrepreneurship because they will see that methods will
differ greatly depending on the intent and strategy needed in each type. Instead, research can be
focused on what methods and content are most useful in different types of entrepreneurial learning.
The two dimensions create four quadrants into which entrepreneurial learning can be categorized.
The matrix is shown in Table 1. The quadrants in the matrix contain examples of the types of
programs that would target each type of entrepreneurial learning. The following sections will
describe the rationale for using the 2 dimensions, and then discuss the quadrants and the types of
educational programs or offerings that typify each.
Table 1. Categorized emphases in entrepreneurship education goals
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
Traditional business
skills
Small business
creation
High Intrapreneurship Tech startups
Dimension 1: Intention to start new ventures
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Categorizing along intention to start ventures helps to differentiate between intensive startup
experiences where students are guided in actively creating a new venture versus more skills-based
experiences where students learn about creativity, innovation, and business skills without actually
starting a venture. Prior research has shown that students enroll in entrepreneurship for a variety of
reasons. These include seeking guidance on how to proceed with a venture or product idea, broader
career options, general interest in the topic, desire to see if they could make it as an entrepreneur,
earning additional educational credentials, and desire to take business classes (Duval-Couetil, Gotch,
& Yi, 2014). Students who have high intentions to start ventures, but find themselves in more general
skill-building courses, may be frustrated by the lack of specific instructions on creating an
organization. On the other hand, students who are interested in entrepreneurship, but do not currently
have the ideas or the confidence to start a venture may be bored by some elements of business
creation, and want more opportunities to gain transferable skills.
Instruction that focuses on low intention to start ventures will emphasize the development of
entrepreneurial skills, behaviors, and thinking patterns without pushing students to actually start a
firm or create a startup. By focusing on skills, such a program could prevent students from wasting
time creating projections, validating with customers, or prototyping an idea they do not really care
about or wish to pursue. It could also spend more time teaching students intrapreneurship concepts
that will help them to find, create, and capitalize on new opportunities within existing organizations.
Entrepreneurial learning on the other end of this dimension focuses on venture creation. This type of
instruction should guide students to find and validate an idea, and then iteratively test and improve
their offering. Students should also learn legal, accounting, and other details that will be necessary as
they start their venture. It can also provide students with opportunities to find and raise capital to
fund their new enterprise.
Differentiating along intent to start ventures is useful for researchers and practitioners of
entrepreneurship education. For researchers, it is important to differentiate because it changes the
assumptions and expected outcomes that underlie their work. The kinds of questions that researchers
ask, and the methods that they employ, will change drastically depending on whether learning is
focused on firm creation. If a program or course is taught with high intention to create a new venture,
measuring the success of such a course will be fairly straightforward: It will depend on how many
students go on to create businesses and their economic impact. In a low intention scenario, the
measures will not be as simple. Rather, they may focus on measuring students’ ability to handle
uncertainty, knowledge of business processes and strategy, ability to generate novel solutions to a
problem, or communication skills.
There is also value in this type of categorization for administrators and educators. By clearly
articulating this difference, programs and courses can more easily align the intentions of the program,
the instructors, the assessments, and the students. This will prevent students with intentions to start
ventures being disappointed by a lack of depth in a course focused on building entrepreneurial skills
or mindset. It will also help students who do not already have ideas for new ventures to find courses
and programs that will teach them to think and act entrepreneurially, even when they intend to work
in an existing organization. With clear differentiation between these types of offerings, students can
make better choices about the courses and programs in which they participate and enroll in the
activities that best meet their needs.
Dimension 2: Level of uncertainty
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
High
As stated previously, various strands of research on entrepreneurship and innovation point to the fact
that entrepreneurs tend to use certain strategic patterns more than non-entrepreneurs. Although these
researchers study different facets of the entrepreneurial experience, their findings indicate definite
patterns. It is apparent that predictable scenarios require different approaches from highly uncertain
ones. The level of uncertainty or predictability governs the type of strategy that should be employed,
which will dramatically affect the content to be taught and the methodological approach of the
instructor.
Low intention/low uncertainty
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
Traditional business
skills
High
The top left quadrant of the matrix represents low intention to start new ventures and low levels of
uncertainty. The types of entrepreneurial activities in this quadrant will be focused on general
business acumen and knowledge. These will not necessarily be focused on the creation of novel ideas
or entities, but will equip students with the business knowhow that is required to be an effective part
of a business organization. Traditionally, engineering students have been able to access these types of
offerings through business schools or engineering management programs, but they are more recently
receiving them through entrepreneurship programs.
Although this category seems less exciting or novel than some of the others, it can be an important
element of an engineering student’s educational experience. It is becoming increasingly important for
engineering students to be conversant in business language and proficient in management skills as
they are increasingly being employed in non-industrial, or non-technical, positions (Wei, 2005).
Better understanding of the overall business has been a noted benefit of graduates of engineering and
entrepreneurship programs (Duval-Couetil & Wheadon, 2013).
Low intention/high uncertainty
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
Traditional business
skills
High Intrapreneurship
The bottom left quadrant represents low intention to start new ventures, but high uncertainty in the
value proposition. This type of educational offering will prepare students to work within existing
organizations, but to help those organizations to find and exploit new opportunities. They will need
to be well-trained in entrepreneurial thinking and behavior and understand the types of innovations
that will provide the organization with new growth.
These types of programs or courses are not often clearly defined. Instead, intrapreneurship is often
considered to be a side-effect of teaching entrepreneurship to students who do not go on to create
firms. There are obvious similarities between ways that entrepreneurs create new ventures and
intrapreneurs create new value within firms, but the current lack of focused instruction on
intrapreneurship ignores the differences between them. The two types differ greatly in terms
deadlines, fundraising, available resources, existing constraints, and many others. Although
Christensen's (1997) seminal work describes the advantages that smaller firms have in pursuing
disruptive innovations, little work has been done to describe the different skills needed to pursue
them in existing versus new enterprises.
This is especially unfortunate considering the increasing demand in industry for engineering students
who think and solve problems entrepreneurially. More and more, existing corporations recognize the
need for employees who can create new opportunities for growth. By learning about emergent
strategy, effectual logic, and how to capitalize on disruptive innovations, students will be prepared to
make decisions and add value in increasingly turbulent environments and unpredictable corporate
scenarios.
High intention/low uncertainty
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
Traditional business
skills programs
Small business
creation
High Intrapreneurship
The top right quadrant represents educational offerings with high intention to start ventures and low
levels of uncertainty. Entrepreneurial activity in this space will appear similar to small business
creation and management programs. These offerings will equip students with the skills and
knowledge required to create a small business in which the value proposition and business model are
already proven. Instruction focuses on the learning how to analyze an existing local market to see if
another business of their type could be profitable.
For engineering students, this could be forming a local structural engineering firm to bid on design
and building projects, or opening a small manufacturing shop to provide parts for a nearby auto
manufacturer. It is not a novel idea, but is valuable to customers and can provide employment for the
students. The skills needed in this quadrant are different from the others and will focus on the details
of small business creation such as legal, payroll, liability, cost estimation, bidding, negotiation, and
market analysis. They may also include specialized technical training such as how to practically use
engineering principles to create detailed structural plans for an office building.
High intention/high uncertainty
Current intention to start new ventures
Low High
Uncertainty of
value proposition
Low
Traditional business
skills
Small business
creation
High Intrapreneurship Tech startups
The last quadrant is most commonly associated with modern technology startups. It consists of high
intention to start a new venture and high uncertainty. In this space are offerings that focus on
teaching students how to create and find new opportunities and create new ventures around the new
offerings. These are considered areas of high uncertainty due to the novelty of the students’
innovation. If it is a truly innovative offering, there will be very little knowledge about its ability to
create new markets or the willingness of customers to pay for it. This is why it is important for these
activities to promote emergent strategies and effectual thinking patterns.
In comparison with activity in the bottom left (intrapreneurship) quadrant, this quadrant should be
more focused on providing students with understanding of new venture creation. In addition to
learning to think and act in uncertain circumstances, students in this type of offering should learn
how to raise capital, what types of capital they should seek at different stages, how to price offerings,
creating an organization, and hiring the right people, among others.
This type of offering is often found in intensive startup experiences or entrepreneurial accelerators.
Such programs are natural homes for Lean Launchpad or Lean Startup programs due to their focus
on venture creation and quick, iterative validation and improvement of concepts.
Implications
Categorizing entrepreneurship education offerings as outlined in this paper could have positive
impacts on stakeholders. Researchers, program administrators, and students can benefit from
differentiating between activities with varying intentions and levels of uncertainty.
For researchers
Researchers in entrepreneurial engineering education have had great difficulty in creating
consensus around the definitions, intentions, and outcomes of entrepreneurship education. Given
the vast differences between offerings described in this paper, it is no wonder that such is the
case. With this type of categorization available, researchers will be able to move past definitional
boundary work by acknowledging different types of entrepreneurship, focus on the best practices
in each type, and situate their research in relation to others’.
Debates over definitions of entrepreneurship and what really counts as entrepreneurship have
been repeated for decades. Rather than fighting for one definition or another, it is much simpler
to make entrepreneurship an inclusive term that includes many different subtypes and categories.
By differentiating entrepreneurship education offerings as this paper has, researchers can move
from debating what counts as entrepreneurship education to what works in different types of
entrepreneurship education.
Once the differences between the types of educational offerings are understood, it will be easier
to identify and disseminate best practices. Without categories, researchers find that what works
in one program does not work as well in another. They find it impossible to compare programs
with each other, or to get beyond anecdotal reports of successes and failures that they hope will
benefit others. Armed with meaningful categories, researchers can find different best practices
for different types of offerings. They may find pedagogical methods and curricular tools that will
be beneficial to some types of entrepreneurial education and not others, but if they have good
categories, they will be able to understand why a given method works in one situation and not
another.
As in many new fields of inquiry, entrepreneurship education research has often failed to create
coherent understanding among researchers. Many research projects in entrepreneurship
education for engineers have little grounding in prior work and little integration of similar work
from other fields. It is not uncommon for researchers to fail to mention important work in
cognitive science, entrepreneurial cognition, educational measurement theory, engineering
cognition, or behavioral economics, any of which could impact the way that questions and
studies are framed. For these reasons, it is important that researchers in the field have ways to
situate their research in relation to others. The framework in this paper can be an important part
of developing a shared language that researchers can use to relate their ideas to others in the
field, even if some of those others are situated on the opposite end of the dimensions outlined.
For administrators and students
A major benefit of this type of categorization is the ability for administrators of programs to
clearly articulate the intents and outcomes of their programs. Instead of saying that a program
equips engineering students with entrepreneurship skills, and administrator can describe their
programs’ focus within entrepreneurship. Articulating the focus of a program or course is
important because it helps to align objectives across multiple courses and instructors within a
program, it gives prospective students a clearer view of what they are getting into, and it helps
administrators describe what an engineering entrepreneurship program at their institution is (and
what it is not).
Alignment of objectives is an important element of effective education practice. In any course,
the course content, assessments, and pedagogical practices should be aligned to improve learning
and to have valid understanding of the students’ progress. This is more difficult across a whole
program with multiple instructors and course offerings, but it becomes almost impossible if the
outcomes are not clearly defined. The multiple definitions of entrepreneurship create many more
opportunities for confusion and misalignment across programs. By articulating the particular
type of entrepreneurship education being offered, administrators can better ensure that
coursework across the program reflects the desired outcome of the institution or department.
Having clearly articulated outcomes and intentions for offerings also helps to align students’
goals and desires with their educational experiences. A student who has a commercializable idea
and needs guidance to bring it to market would be very disappointed with a course situated on
the low intention end of the matrix. A student who intends to work for a large corporation may
find that a Lean Launchpad course would push them to go through the motions of creating a
company, when they really hoped to gain project management skills or learn how different parts
of a corporation interact and relate to each other. By better describing the types of offerings
available, students will be able to choose courses that are aligned with their needs, intentions,
and entrepreneurial readiness.
In addition to better describing offerings to others within the program and prospective students,
articulating the different intents of different entrepreneurship types can benefit the adoption of
these types of programs. As entrepreneurship education initiatives grow and develop in many
universities, there are a number of obstacles to wider adoption. One such obstacle is pushback
from other engineering faculty who do not think that entrepreneurship education has much to do
with teaching students to be good engineers in their field. This can be explained by a lack of
clarity concerning what entrepreneurship is. If a civil engineering professor sees
entrepreneurship as focused on making new social smartphone apps, it makes sense that
entrepreneurship would seem irrelevant. By describing the type of entrepreneurship being
practiced, such as one that equips students with thinking skills that help them to navigate goal
ambiguity and uncertainty, it is possible that resistant faculty may gain better understanding of
the benefits of entrepreneurship education for their students.
Practical Application
For the sake of clarity, this paper has discussed the different types of entrepreneurship in stark
contrast to each other. In reality, these categories are not all-or-nothing, black or white. Real
engineering, social, and economic problems are neither completely predictable nor completely
unknown. All action to create new value will use elements of predictive and effectual logic. To
best prepare students, instruction needs to provide them with opportunities to practice both types
of strategies.
Additionally, educational offerings rarely focus solely on skill development or on venture
creation. A course that focuses on venture creation will need to help students develop new skills,
and a skills-focused course may teach skills in the context of venture creation.
Rather than choosing one type or the other, administrators of programs should use this matrix to
determine and communicate where their focus lies. There may be institutions that prefer to
specialize in one quadrant of the matrix over others. Others may find that they want to cover all
aspects of entrepreneurship, but have different courses that cover each part of the matrix. It is not
important that programs become “purists” in one form or another of entrepreneurial education,
but programs should be able to articulate where they fall on the spectra that make up both
dimensions of the matrix. By clearly stating their intended focus, programs can better align their
instruction and assessments, researchers can better situate their findings, and students can make
more informed choices about the courses and programs in which they enroll.
Conclusion
It is clear that the emerging field of study concerning entrepreneurship education needs more
organization. It needs a framework in which multiple definitions of entrepreneurial education
activity can be situated and related to other work in the field. This paper proposes a scheme for
categorizing educational offerings based on the intention to start new ventures and the level of
uncertainty in the value proposition. By so doing, this work is intended to create a broader
definition of entrepreneurship education and create meaningful categories across which
researchers, practitioners, and students can have clearer understanding and consensus concerning
the benefits of, and best methods for, entrepreneurship education for engineers.
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