Abstract:

Conscious, diverse and effective entrepreneurship education that enables the entrepreneurial skill and mindset development of students is one of the cornerstones of an optimal and sustainable university-centered entrepreneurship ecosystem (UCEE). This paper hypothesizes that the increasing prevalence and application of education technology (EdTech) solutions and emerging multi sided platforms (MSPs) targeting higher education institutions (HEIs) have the potential to transform higher education as we know it today, including entrepreneurship education and hence have the power to positively affect university-centered entrepreneurship ecosystems. This chain of positive effects, however, can only be realized if decision-makers and users are proactive and are ready to engage with and adopt EdTech and MSP solutions next to or instead of traditional approaches and methodologies.

Through reviewing the existing relevant literature around EdTech/MSPs, entrepreneurship education and UCEEs, this paper sets out to uncover and account for the link between entrepreneurship education, university-centered entrepreneurship ecosystems, EdTech and multi sided platforms. Through the analysis of select existing solutions while introducing and highlighting the issue of platform readiness and proposing a framework suggestion to measure individual and institutional platform readiness, it aims to construct a reference point for higher education institutions looking to advance and update their entrepreneurship education strategies by implementing EdTech and MSP solutions and through this to ensure the enhancement of their entrepreneurship ecosystems.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship education, university-centered entrepreneurship ecosystem, platform readiness, platformization, multi sided platform, EdTech, higher education.