PhD Defense | Epistemologies of entrepreneurship education: experiments and outcomes

Why is it that entrepreneurship education sometimes works and sometimes not? Does epistemology play a role in this process?

These are the principal questions addressed in this thesis. Currently, much research on entrepreneurship education outcomes implies that all entrepreneurship education is the same. In response thereto, this thesis situates at the intersection of entrepreneurship and education philosophy to derive two distinct classes of entrepreneurship education as a function of philosophical vantage points.

Following this, a typology for the relationship between what is perceived to constitute entrepreneurship, approaches to epistemology in education, and different entrepreneurship outcomes is developed and operationalized. The typology and a realist perspective are then integrated to translate normative statements regarding variabilities of philosophical realms and human capital investment outcomes into a set of hypotheses.

For the empirical investigations, data were collected from two natural experiments of two higher education entrepreneurship courses. Data were collected on the outcome variables, particularly entrepreneurship behavior, entrepreneurship performance, and business performance, annually for ten years for all graduates.

Background data were collected for all individuals up to 18 years prior. The results show that epistemological design is crucial to the initiation and development of graduates’ entrepreneurial processes.

More specifically, the findings show that the epistemological design of entrepreneurship education influence whether graduates enter the entrepreneurial process, the speed by which they do so, and, if the firms they create survive, and for how long. Additionally and unexpectedly, this thesis finds empirical arguments in direct contrast to dominant entrepreneurship theory as to why this interaction would
occur.