Changing Entrepreneurship Education: Finding the Right Entrepreneur for the Job

As entrepreneurship courses become more popular, an increasing number of institutions are turning to practising entrepreneurs as a source of classroom instructors. Bringing such people into the classroom, however, generates an entirely new set of questions for a college and its faculty. Four issues that schools should consider in attempting to recruit qualified entrepreneurs are identified: motives, entrepreneurial experiences, academic knowledge and teaching skills. To attract and retain these individuals, schools should offer adequate rewards, support and commitment, and should assign the entrepreneur a faculty “host”.

ENTREPRENEURS AND ORGANISATIONAL GROWTH: SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM AND STRATEGIES FOR HELPING

The difficulties entrepreneurs encounter as their organisations move from the rapid growth to the maturity stage are attributed to a personality/ organisation misfit. Personality characteristics that are an asset in the earlier stages become a liability in the later organisational life‐cycle stages. Several interventions are suggested for use with entrepreneurs who face this situation. The use of reframing strategies that involve unconscious information processing are advocated, as an intervention of last resort, when an entrepreneur wants to stay at the head of the organisation but the misfit is causing problems. This article although purposely speculative and hopefully, provocative, is designed to expand our thinking about the problems entrepreneurs face and to open up possibilities for potential solutions.