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Guidance supporting Europe’s aspiring entrepreneurs
Policy and practice to harness future potential

6.4. Key lessons

Business involvement in entrepreneurial initiatives at all levels has been
generally patchy and unstructured. However, evidence implies that there is
growing interest from companies, entrepreneurs and business professionals to
engage in entrepreneurial ventures, moving towards the strengthening of links
between education, business, research and innovation desired by the Europe
2020 Strategy. Some business professionals are motivated by potential
opportunities to advertise their business (for possible later recruitment purposes)
and others simply want to support entrepreneurialism among students. Some are
motivated by the opportunity to seek student views on their business challenges.
The case studies show that companies have been impressed by the results, and
have gained much from participating. Resources, however, need to be dedicated
to identifying and then engaging business, especially business owners, to ensure
that their involvement benefits the entrepreneurship agenda.
A key lesson generated through the dialogue between entrepreneurs and
aspiring entrepreneurs is that there are no linear pathways or privileged routes
that must be taken to achieve one’s career goals, but that pathways can be
diverse and sometimes unexpected.
Many organisations outside mainstream public education have played a key
role over the years in introducing and supporting the entrepreneurship agenda of
VET and HE institutes. Examples include associations representing
entrepreneurs and/or SMEs, or chambers of commerce; the financial investment
made by such organisations is impressive (e.g. the Nuits de l’Orientation initiative
funded by the French chambers of commerce and industry). The level of
investment afforded can be a proxy for the importance attributed by such
organisations to activity in this field. However, such commitment is not evident
uniformly across Europe. International organisations such as Ja-Ye and
EuroPEN have also made significant investments. These organisations are the
main source of entrepreneurial activity in many countries in different ways.

6.5. Future challenges

It would be a significant task to create universal access to entrepreneurship
education and guidance. Ensuring that teachers involved in entrepreneurship
education are trained/retrained and supported to apply the experiential, hands-on
approach required to deliver entrepreneurship education, and have access to
guidance materials to support their work, is a major task. The study confirmed

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