Youth Start: Entrepreneurial Challenges Project Programme – An Innovative Way of Teaching

Introduction

In the context of entrepreneurship education in Europe, the majority of countries are in a process of educational reform and are embedding this type of educational offering (European Commission, 2016). One of their objectives is to strengthen entrepreneurship education from the perspective of lifelong learning across all educational levels.

For almost three decades there has been a strong focus on developing entrepreneurial skills among students at all levels of education. During this time, the field has experienced much development (Katz, 2003). This has naturally increased the demand for programme evaluations of the different approaches in order to establish their effectiveness and efficiency. Unfortunately, a majority of these assessment studies lack theoretical foundation and they typically focus on a single educational programme (Fayolle, 2013). Additionally, most of these studies also suffer from severe methodological flaws. It has thus been difficult to draw conclusions about whether it is the programme or the characteristics of the participants that generate the effects (Rideout & Gray, 2013).

Naturally, it is challenging to assign educational treatment through a randomised process. However, considering the costs educational programmes entail, it is equally surprising that there are so few examples of educational programme evaluations that used the randomised controlled trial method (Bouguen & Gurgand, 2012).

Many studies demonstrate contradictory results, but it is difficult to assess whether this has to do with different contexts or whether it is a product of flawed methodological design. Even the quantitative meta-analyses in the field disagree with regard to the effects of these types of educational interventions. Martin, McNally, & Kay (2013) concluded that education on this topic has a small but positive influence on entrepreneurship-related human capital and outcomes, and Bae, Qian, Miao, & Fiet (2014) did find, however, that the difference in entrepreneurial intentions between “normal” students and entrepreneurship students disappeared when they controlled for previous levels of intentions. This suggests that there is a significant amount of self-selection that needs to be controlled for when assessing the impact of the programmes.

Oosterbeek, Van Praag, & Ijsselstein (2009) performed a rigorous experimental study of the well-established entrepreneurship “Company Programme”. Like most evaluation programmes within the field, they focused on assessing the effect that the programme had on the students’ entrepreneurial intentions. They reached a somewhat unexpected finding that this programme led to a decrease in entrepreneurial intentions. Elert, Andersson, & Wennberg (2012), who used propensity score matching in their longitudinal analysis, did, however, find that the “Company Programme” had positive effects on the participants’ long-term entrepreneurial behaviour. A third study at primary level that applied a rigorous experimental design was found that the programme had no significant effects on the pupils’ entrepreneurial intentions or their entrepreneurial cognitive skills, but did have a very positive impact on their noncognitive skills (e.g. pro-activeness, risk-taking, creativity) (Rosendahl-Huber, Sloof, & Van Praag, 2014).

Thus, it seems necessary to use comparative analysis to understand what are the mechanisms that are causing effects. To increase our understanding of these mechanisms it is also recommended that qualitative data collection is performed (Mohr, 1999). Comparative programme evaluation is, however, not just effective when it comes to investigating dimensions and mechanisms, it also makes it possible to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of different types of programmes. Since this information is typically what policymakers’ value most, many experts within the field have requested an increased use of this methodology. It is therefore necessary to move from theoretical single-case evaluations and to start focusing on theory-driven evaluations of multiple educational initiatives (Fayolle, 2013).

Interviews are particularly useful for getting the story behind a participant's experiences. This paper presents a descriptive study where we used in-depth interviews to design a case study following earlier studies (Leal et al., 2017).