Over the past decade, entrepreneurship education (EE) has increasingly been introduced as a school-wide approach to stimulating an entrepreneurial mindset across various educational levels. We refer to this as “wide approaches to EE”. Wide approaches to EE require education programs that go beyond simply defining entrepreneurial competencies (the “what” question) and ask for learning activities that enable the enfolding, cultivation, and development of such competencies (the “how” question). Although important steps have been made with respect to addressing the “how” question, principles to actually design wide EE programs are scarce. Here, we advance the educational practice and research regarding wide EE by deducing design principles for wide EE programs across educational levels based on core theories in the entrepreneurship literature, including experiential learning, social constructivism, and effectuation theory. The 11 design principles represent the entrepreneurial process, the task, and the context and relationships of wide EE programs, and are discussed in three European cases from different educational levels in order to illustrate how the design principles can be used for understanding wide EE practices. The identified design principles can promote evidence-informed discussion among teachers, curriculum designers, policy-makers, scholars, and others regarding the design, implementation, and investigation of wide EE programs.

Recognizing that detailed work on social competence in the context of early entrepreneurial processes is still scarce and, at the same time, building further on existing work, we investigated how and to what extent social competence influences social capital among students with latent entrepreneurial ambitions. For this purpose, an empirical study was carried out among 131 Masters students following a university entrepreneurship education programme. Hierarchal regression analysis showed that social competence, as a composite variable, had a significant effect on the social capital of early-stage entrepreneurs. In particular, social competence directly influenced (structural) aspects of social capital, namely the number of people the early-stage entrepreneur had access to via strong and weak links, as well as the range of occupations these people represented. Thus, social competence increased not only the number of ties (either strong or weak), but also the range of occupations the entrepreneur had access to. Additional analyses – adding social competence as five separate underlying social skills – showed a more differentiated picture, suggesting that the whole (e.g. social competence) is more than the sum of its parts (e.g. the individual skills). The outcomes of this research contribute to the scientific literature concerning the role and impact of social competence on social capital in general, and entrepreneurial networking in particular. Furthermore, it provides the first stepping-stones for social competence development in entrepreneurship education programmes.

The rationale behind this study is that entrepreneurship education programmes (EEP) in post‐compulsory education mainly address entrepreneurial intentions, instead of actual entrepreneurial behaviour, and that students, compared to practicing entrepreneurs, might have a wide range of entrepreneurial intentions when entering such a programme. The question is whether or not students indeed have different entrepreneurial intentions and, if so, whether it is possible to predict these intentions based on various classical antecedents known to influence these intentions. A quantitative study among 102 life‐sciences students was carried out in order to investigate this question. The results show that students, independent of their domain of study, differentiate between different types of entrepreneurial intentions. Furthermore, the results illustrate that gender and entrepreneurial self‐efficacy have a direct influence on entrepreneurial intentions. However, the effect of gender depended on the type of entrepreneurial intentions studied. As EEP aim to increase entrepreneurship not only as a start‐up activity but also more generally in the world of work, the outcomes of this study suggest that it is fruitful for such programmes to rethink the way they operationalise, approach and aim to stimulate entrepreneurial behaviour of students.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the emerging literature on sustainable entrepreneurship by studying knowledge, motivation and early stage outcomes of sustainable agricultural entrepreneurship in the context of farmer groups in Burundi.Design/methodology/approach: Quantitative and qualitative data were combined in a multiple-source case study. Data were analyzed using content analysis and basic statistics.Findings: Results revealed that farmer groups’ prior knowledge (PK) on environmental sustainability is better developed than their social and economic sustainability. This is reflected in the environmental sustainability part of the business plans (BPs), which is generally better than the economic and social sustainability parts. Moreover, the top groups on PK identified opportunities directly related to their PK. Pro-activeness of the group was a more determining factor than risk taking and innovativeness. Furthermore, there seemed to be a positive interplay between the groups’ PK, entrepreneurial orientation and knowledge motivation (KM) and the quality of the sustainable BP. In particular, KM seemed to be important, but other variables also explained the quality of the BP, such as level of education.Originality/value: This research fills a gap in literature because there are few empirical studies on agricultural entrepreneurship that focus on the earliest phase of opportunity recognition, let alone studies that focus on sustainable opportunity recognition in the context of emerging economies such as Burundi. Furthermore, in this research, the authors studied well-known knowledge, motivations and outcomes of sustainable entrepreneurship.