Educating the Next Wave of Entrepreneurs a report issued by the Foum’s Global Enterprise Initiative (GEI) aims to raise awareness of the importance of entrepreneurship education in unlocking entrepreneurial capabilities to meet the global challenges of the 21st century.
The importance of entrepreneurship education in developing the skills, attitudes and behaviours required to create jobs, generate economic growth, advance human welfare and stimulate innovation to address global challenge is highlighted throughout the report.
The report summarises opportunities, challenges and current practices across the globe covering youth (with a focus on disadvantaged youth), higher education (focusing on high growth entrepreneurship) and social inclusion (with a focus on marginalised communities).
A selection of the report’s Call to Action includes the following recommendations:
Transform the Education System
• 21st century methods and tools, including cross-disciplinary
approaches and interactive teaching methods need to be adopted by
Educational Institutions of all levels, to encourage creativity,
innovation, critical thinking, opportunity recognition and social
awareness
• Academia should embed entrepreneurship not only into the curriculum, but also into the institutional model
• Goals, policies, outcomes, structures and rewards should encourage the
educational approaches necessary for current and future generations of
students
• Ambitious plans for entrepreneurship education at the national and
regional levels need to be developed by policy-makers and governments
• Engagement between the private sector, government and academia is required to help transform the education system
Build the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (the role of society)
• Academic institutions are central to providing entrepreneurship
education. In parallel external organisations have an increasingly
critical role in working with both formal and informal educational
programmes, in addition to reaching out to specific target groups who
have been underserved and or socially excluded
• Appropriate regulatory framework for start-ups, growth firm, employment contracts and intellectual property is required
• Strengthened links between academic institutions and the private
sector are required to increase exposure of students to practical and
real-life examples of entrepreneurship and encourage the entrepreneurial
environment.
• Private and non-profit sectors should encourage and support programmes
targeting underserved groups such as women, minorities, and
disadvantaged or disabled people.
Strive for Effective Outcomes and Impact
• Greater clarity is needed on the goals and impact of entrepreneurship
education, based on a broadly defined set of outcomes, not just narrow
measures such as the number of start-ups created
• To measure entrepreneurship education effectively, better data is needed
• There is still not enough empirical and long-term research on entrepreneurship education and its impact
• Academic institutions need to set high standards for entrepreneurship
curricula and research to develop a clear framework of desired outcomes
and measures to track them.
• Policy-makers should encourage and support studies into data collection on entrepreneurship education.
• The private sector, foundations and other actors can raise awareness
of the importance of entrepreneurship education practices.
Calls for Action are also made on using the power of technology as an enabler.
Geared towards high-level policy-makers and leaders from the private and academic sectors the report will stimulate discussion between decision-makers at the Forum’s 2009 regional summits in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and India on how best to advance the entrepreneurship agenda in their region.
Click here to download the full Educating the Next Wave of Entrepreneurs report, case studies and more
Click here to watch an interview with Alex Wong, Senior Director and Head of the GEI, World Economic Forum