Dr Jeff Cornwall

There is a movement afoot to standardize entrepreneurship education. While there are some benefits to setting standards and even to accreditation, I hope that the traditional academics can keep their hands off entrepreneurship education for at least a while longer.
Certainly part of what has made entrepreneurship education flourish has been the creative juices that flow in many of its pioneers. We seem to be hung-up on finding legitimacy with our peers in the academy, so we fret about developing a theory base. The truth is, business education itself is in its infancy. We have only been teaching business education since the 1950’s (Authors note: I believe that anything developed within my life time should be considered relatively new, or even down right modern. It may be denial, but that is my premise and I’m sticking to it!).
When I compare my own business education which began about thirty years ago to today, much has changed. Why? Some is from new knowledge, but much of it is because we live in a changing world. Business operates within a complex context. Governmental policy can drastically change major parts of what we once knew to be true. The Finance and Banking text I studied from is no longer even close to today’s understanding. Deregulation of banking and financial services transformed this sector beyond recognition from what we learned in my MBA program in the late 1970’s. Social trends have had a tremendous impact. My wife was part of the first major wave of women going into the traditionally male work world. Human Resources texts are now full of discussion on sexual harassment and gender bias in the workplace. Amazing new theories have fundamentally changed the fields of finance and economics. And entrepreneurship? It wasn’t even a word that we learned. Now it is everywhere in business curricula.
So relax! Entrepreneurship is a fundamentally part of our current economic transformation. Let the creativity that is so much a part of entrepreneurship do its work. Let the market judge what programs and what knowledge work for entrepreneurs. Let us continue to play with the concepts and tools and how to teach them. I continually change my courses, and advocate that we reinvent our whole curriculum every few years. Just as entrepreneurs find that their businesses look very little like they envisioned in their business plans, I imagine that how we teach entrepreneurship will continue to evolve and improve. After all, entrepreneurship education is really still in its start-up phase and the world around us is in a period of amazing change. Give it time.