Page 65 - guidance-supporting-europe-s-aspiring-entrepreneurs-policy-and-practice-to-harness-future-potential

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

available whereas in Norway, entrepreneurship education is reported as being
‘fairly well established’. In France, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, national experts
reported that modules on entrepreneurship were available, but that no degree
courses were in place. In Hungary and Iceland only business school students
have the opportunity to specialise in entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship education is still more commonly available in business
schools than in other departments. For instance, 61% of entrepreneurship
modules in England are taught in business schools, whereas 9% are taught in
engineering departments and only 1% in health and medicine (National Council
for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE), 2007). Similar results were reported in
Spain, where more than half of the modules were taught in economic and
business sciences and the rest were taught in technology, social sciences and
health sciences.
A number of sources, however, have pointed out that business schools are
not the most appropriate places to teach entrepreneurship (European
Commission, 2008; Potter, 2008, p. 53). Entrepreneurial ideas often originate in
the departments of science, engineering or technology and the introduction of
entrepreneurship courses with interdisciplinary orientation can create
opportunities for collaboration between business experts and those from other
departments. Such an approach supports joint technological developments,
innovations and commercialisation, and collaboration can ultimately lead to new
high-growth ventures or spin-offs from universities and colleges. In the US,
approximately 74% of universities and colleges offer entrepreneurship
programmes to their total student population (Volkmann et al., 2009).
A number of universities in Europe have started to take an interdisciplinary
approach by embedding entrepreneurship into their curricula. Most often this
takes the form of an elective modular approach, which has created new
opportunities to exploit business ideas generated, for example, in science and
humanities departments. Queen’s University, Belfast provides one of the best
examples of this approach: since 2000 the university has established a
pioneering model of entrepreneurship education within the curriculum and
entrepreneurship education is currently available for all humanities, social
sciences and hard sciences students.
Interdisciplinary programmes are more commonly available in West
European countries (e.g. Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Iceland, Portugal,
Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom) than in Eastern Europe and tend to be found in
Science and Engineering departments. In other countries such initiatives are
relatively new (Greece), rare (Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania) or non-
existent (Latvia, Malta, Slovenia, Slovakia). There have been improvements in

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