PurposeDespite a growing body of literature in the field, there is still considerable uncertainty as to whether entrepreneurs are born or made, which has led to an ongoing debate in the entrepreneurship academy about whether we can actually teach individuals to be entrepreneurs. With this in mind, this two‐part paper aims to address the question of whether or not entrepreneurship can be taught.Design/methodology/approachIn part I the importance of entrepreneurship in a modern, constantly changing environment is outlined, and the various ways in which entrepreneurship programmes can be categorised are considered. Attention is given to the various difficulties associated with the design of programmes, as well as their objectives, content and delivery methods. Part II of the paper focuses on the difficulties associated with programme evaluation and the various approaches adopted to determining and measuring effectiveness. This leads to a discussion on whether or not entrepreneurship can be successfully taught.FindingsDespite the growth in entrepreneurship education and training programmes, the paper reports that little uniformity can be found. Attention is drawn to the art and the science of entrepreneurship, with the consensus that at least some aspects of entrepreneurship can successfully be taught.Originality/valueThe authors highlight the need for evaluating programmes and for educators and trainers to have a fuller understanding of what they wish to achieve from their programme from the outset in order to ensure a more accurate assessment of the outcomes.

This Special Issue focuses on entrepreneurial leadership, an area which is very much in its infancy. Even though leadership has been a major topic of research in psychology and management for almost a century, many of its concepts and debates have not yet been adopted in entrepreneurship and small business management. As a field, entrepreneurial leadership is still evolving, lacks definitional clarity and has not yet developed appropriate tools to assess it characteristics and behaviours. The conceptual and empirical papers in this Special Issue address some of these limitations by consolidating existing embryonic theory development, stimulating new conceptual thinking and highlighting unanswered questions and opportunities for further research.

Knowledge production in entrepreneurship requires inclusivity as well as diversity and pluralism in research perspectives and approaches. In this article, the authors address concerns about interpretivist research regarding validity, reliability, objectivity, generalizability, and communicability of results that militate against its more widespread acceptance. Following the nonfoundationalist argument that all observation is theory-laden, context specific, and that there are no external criteria against which to assess research design and execution and the data produced, the authors propose that quality must be internalized within the underlying research philosophy rather than something to be tested upon completion. This requires a shift from the notion of validity as an outcome to validation as a process. To elucidate this, they provide a guiding framework and present a case illustration that will assist an interpretivist entrepreneurship researcher to establish and demonstrate the quality of their work.

351The context for the research presented in this article arises from increasing interest, by academics and practitioners, in the importance of learning and knowledge in the knowledgebased economy. In particular, we consider the scope for applying concepts of learning within the field of entrepreneurship. While it has gained currency within the field of management, the application of these concepts to entrepreneurship has been limited. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, we review the development of the field of entrepreneurship as a context for the emergence of learning as an area of scholarly attention, summarize a number of key themes emerging from the organizational learning literature, and outline the article selection process and summarize the key elements of each of the included articles. The article concludes with some reflections on future research at the interface between learning and the entrepreneurial context.