Purpose The quest of this paper is to justify, elaborate and elucidate the concepts of action, experience and reflection, and how they are intertwined when discussing contemporary entrepreneurship education. These concepts have been given a meaning in entrepreneurship education, but have not been discussed in-depth, and by that have been abridged in meaning and purpose, and mostly been treated in isolation from each other. Design/methodology/approach The paper is conceptual and takes its starting point in the historical development of the field and discusses the concepts, from philosophical roots and their application, in entrepreneurship education. Findings Neither of the discussed concepts are enough to generate learning one by one, as they are intertwined within the learning process that aims to generate knowledge. From this perspective, an understanding of how these concepts work, both individually and in synergy, is of importance for entrepreneurship education. Research limitations/implications The discussion presented in this paper may be a starting point for future empirical studies on entrepreneurial learning, by developing the meaning of action, reflections and experience, or by trying to conceptualize them. Practical implications The study indicates that entrepreneurship education should not concentrate only on one dimension of the entrepreneurial learning process, as for example on actions, but should try to combine all of its discussed elements. Originality/value By exploring the origins and developments around the concepts, the paper brings a deepened understanding of what the field considers as important when learning entrepreneurship. By decomposing and mutually referring the concepts, we contribute to the call of strengthening the theoretical and philosophical understanding in entrepreneurship education.

This study challenges the basic reasoning behind Lazear's theory on entrepreneurship (2005). Based on the key motive of maximizing one's lifetime income, Lazear posits that individuals with a balanced set of skills should have a higher probability of being self-employed. His ''Jack-of-all-trades'' hypothesis presumes that entrepreneurs need sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to succeed, while paid employees benefit from being specialists in a certain area demanded by the labor market. Because most women-led businesses are neither based on the motive of making money nor are they growth oriented, we argue that maximizing their lifetime income is not the main motivation of many women to start a business. However, we argue that Lazear's theory can be extended to motivations that are mostly stated for women entrepreneurs as well. We apply it to a specific representative sample of 1384 women graduates in Germany and test our hypothesis with logit regression. A dichotomized measure indicating whether a women graduate was self-employed (n = 706) or not (n = 678) served as the dependent variable. Our results widely confirm Lazear's assumption for women graduates who run relatively small businesses in terms of sales and employment: professional training, balanced industry experience, and balanced entrepreneurship-based self-efficacy increase the probability of being self-employed. Solo self-employed tend to have balanced industry experience more often than those being in a team or having employees. Lazear's theory has male as the norm, and as such, does not readily apply to the case of women-but could and should be extended to women's specifics.

Although entrepreneurship education is promoted through an active learning approach, critical concerns regarding how to educate potential entrepreneurs has increased. To remedy this, we pose the question: “Who is the student entrepreneur?” Building on conceptual work from developmental psychology, expertise research, pedagogy, and andragogy, we problematize based on the key characteristics of the emerging adult; a construct originating from developmental psychology. We illustrate an educational process moving from a pedagogical phase into an andragogical phase where the learner becomes in control of the learning process. As a result, we propose a continuum model of entrepreneurship education for emerging adults.

If experience is the guiding light in entrepreneurship education, then why is there so little mention of a philosophy of experience? This article aims to illuminate the philosophical foundations upon which entrepreneurship education rests by discussing learning through experience. In particular, we discuss the concept of experience used in educational research and learning activities for fostering knowledge development in entrepreneurship education. To illustrate our discussion, we develop a diagram that addresses primary and secondary experience and its interplay as well as a model that further illustrates how educative entrepreneurial experience could be researched through the empirical phenomenology. We suggest that although entrepreneurship is currently positioned as an experiential subject in academia, the theoretical and philosophical roots of experience in learning have not been fully addressed, leading to a deficit in our understanding of how knowledge is derived from experience, and how experience may differ depending on its philosophical underpinnings.

Purpose Although the role of reflections in entrepreneurship education is undeniable, the research has focused mainly on their advantages and consequences for learning process, whereas their dynamics and interrelations with other mental processes remain unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to better understand how personality and intelligence constructs: cognition, conation, and affection evolve and change along the learning process during entrepreneurship education. Design/methodology/approach To better understand reflective processes in entrepreneurial learning this paper adopts the tripartite constructs of personality and intelligence. By employing longitudinal explorative research approach and self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm, the authors follow students’ reflections during their two-year learning processes. First, the authors try to identify how the interplay between the cognitive, conative, and affective aspects emerges in students’ reflections. Then, the authors investigate how this interplay evolves during the individual learning process and finally, by looking for similarities in these learning pathways, the authors aim to identify patterns of students’ reflective learning process. Findings All constructs are present during the learning process and all are prone to change. The individual constructs alone shed no light on the interplay between different constructs, but rather that the interplay between sub-constructs should be taken into consideration as well. This seems to be particularly true for cognition, as procedural and declarative knowledge have very different profiles. Procedural knowledge emerges together with emotions, motivation, and volition, whereas the profile of declarative knowledge is individual. The unique profile of declarative knowledge in students’ reflections is an important finding as declarative knowledge is regarded as the center of current pedagogic practices. Research limitations/implications The study broadens the understanding of reflective practices in the entrepreneurial learning process and the interplay between affective, cognitive, and conative sub-constructs and reflective practices in entrepreneurship education. The findings clearly indicate the need for further research on the interplay between sub-constructs and students’ reflection profiles. The authors see the study as an attempt to apply an exploratory statistical method for the problem in question. Practical implications The results are able to advise pedagogy. Practical implications concern the need to develop reflective practises in entrepreneurial learning interventions to enhance all three meta-competencies, even though there are so far no irrefutable findings to indicate that some types of reflection may be better than others. Originality/value The results of the analysis indicate that it is possible to study the complex and dynamic interplay between sub-constructs of cognitive, conative and affective constructs. Moreover, the research succeeded in identifying both individual variations and general reflection patterns and changes in these during the learning process. This was possible by adopting a longitudinal explorative research approach with SOM analyses.

If experience is the guiding light in entrepreneurship education, then where is the philosophy of experience? This article illuminates the philosophical foundations of entrepreneurship education by discussing learning through experience. We introduce a diagram that addresses primary and secondary experiences and their interplay as well as a model that further reveals how educative entrepreneurial experience can be researched through empirical phenomenology. We suggest that although entrepreneurship is currently positioned as an experiential subject in academia, the theoretical and philosophical roots of experience in learning have not been fully addressed, leading to a deficit in our understanding of how knowledge is derived from experience, and how experience may differ depending on its philosophical underpinnings.

The aim of this study is to explore and elaborate the concept of hybrid entrepreneurship, i.e., a simultaneous mix of self-employment (entrepreneurship) and salary employment. Lazear’s theory of entrepreneurship is assessed in terms whether it can explain the phenomenon of being a hybrid entrepreneur. The hypothesis is that the probability of linking a salary job with one’s own business increases with the variety and level of education gained, the broadness of professional and management experience but also the level of entrepreneurial self-efficacy. The hypotheses are tested with multivariate logistic regression, using survey data gathered from 1600 entrepreneurs. In light of the results, Lazear’s theory cannot be unambiguously extended to the case of hybrid entrepreneurs. Although the probability of being a hybrid entrepreneur increases with broader professional and managerial experience, at the same time it diminishes as the level and diversity of education increase. The results suggest that hybrid entrepreneurs are an importantly discrete population and therefore need to be treated separately. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to build on current discussions about the need for and role of guidance in learning and teaching, as well as to theoretically develop its specifics to further advance our scholarly understanding of how to structure and enhance entrepreneurship education.Design/methodology/approachThe paper takes a synthesizing conceptual approach, built on developmental psychology, instructional science, expertise research as well as the pedagogy–andragogy discussion and the role of guidance in contemporary entrepreneurship education research. In addition, a new term, odigogy, is developed.FindingsOdigogy, from the Greek word odigós (to guide), addresses how to navigate student entrepreneurs in higher education. The term seeks to correspond both to the specifics of entrepreneurship as a subject and the characteristics of students in the classroom who are in a transitional phase between adolescence and adulthood.Practical implicationsThe paper contributes to current entrepreneurship education discussions by offering a more balanced terminology positioned between how to teach (pedagogy) and how adults learn (andragogy). The paper provides insights for teachers when developing teaching methods and learning activities in higher education.Originality/valueBy introducing the term odigogy the paper seeks to contribute an enhanced understanding of the entrepreneurial learning process in higher education, which does not match pedagogical assumptions on how to teach children or adolescents, nor andragogical assumptions on how adults learn, or how to engage students in self-directed learning as presented in heutagogy.