Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of common undergraduate entrepreneurship classroom activities on students’ motivational processes related to entrepreneurial careers. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 700 undergraduate students from a variety of majors at a large midwestern university in the USA were invited to take a web-based survey. They were asked to indicate which experiential activities they would participate/were participating in as part of their program. Findings – The findings show that students’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) is a driving force in classroom activities enhancing students’ intentions. However, the authors also found that the type of classroom activities that are common in entrepreneurship education negatively impact students’ ESE. Research limitations/implications – The generalizability is limited to the US region and the link from intention to behavior goes untested, but results strongly supported the adoption of social cognitive career theory to the entrepreneurship domain. Practical implications – This study lends support to the argument that promoting the learning process in entrepreneurship education should focus on real-world experience, action, and reflective processes to engage students in authentic learning, which should lead to greater entrepreneurial abilities and propensity, and eventually to enhanced entrepreneurial performance, which benefits individuals and societies. Social implications – This study suggests that the goals and pedagogical approaches to teaching entrepreneurship are issues that educators may need to revisit and update if the economic benefits of entrepreneurship are to be fully realized. Originality/value – While the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurship activity is well documented in extant literature, this study found that activities that are common in entrepreneurship education may negatively impact students’ ESE and need to be further explored.

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The Entrepreneurship Education Project (http://www.trepeducation.com) is a global, longitudinal research initiative through which university students offer entrepreneurship educators and researchers data‐driven insights into the impact of entrepreneurial education on (1) both the motivational processes underlying students' road to entrepreneurship and through the entrepreneurial process and (2) the process of identity transformation from student to entrepreneur. Rooted in Social Cognitive Career Theory, the Entrepreneurship Education Project data initiative is the largest, most comprehensive study of students across the globe. Phase I data consist of over 18,000 student responses, spanning over 70 countries and 400 universities. This paper presents an overview of the data, study justification, and conceptual scheme. Initial studies provide results indicating the study measures met contemporary standards or reliability, exceed the average sample sizes of top‐tier entrepreneurship journals, and present some very interesting questions to be explored in future research.

Investigations into management actions that reverse organizational decline have produced inconsistent findings. Prior studies have focused on the value of retrenchment actions versus strategic actions to engineer a performance turnaround. These studies, however, have generally not controlled for the cause of firm decline, overlooking a major theoretical contingency. Examining prepackaged software firms in the 1990s, we test the association of strategic and retrenchment actions in facilitating turnarounds in a munificent industry. The results show that measures of strategic actions—new product introductions, strategic alliances, and acquisitions—were positively associated with turnarounds. Conversely, measures of retrenchment actions—layoffs, asset reductions, and product withdrawals—were negatively associated with performance recovery. Our results suggest declining firms in munificent industries cannot retrench their way back to prosperity. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Recent global economic crisis has increasingly demanded bold action from organizations. If these organizations fail to respond appropriately, entrepreneurs will develop new meaningful solutions to the complex and dynamic needs of the market. Guidance of many of these future entrepreneurial leaders falls on the shoulders of those in higher education. My goal in this paper is to suggest a shift toward a more enacted approach in the delivery of this guidance. This suggestion represents my own interpretation, is not generalizable in all environments, and should therefore be viewed with caution.Jeff Vanevenhoven is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Wisconsin -Whitewater.