Abstract:

Responsible growth requires that new ideas will be developed to form new businesses or that the existing companies expand their current business with new products or services in a sustainable manner. Both require cultivating of entrepreneurial thinking and offering support for both intrapreneurs and existing or future entrepreneurs. The Higher Education institutes (HEI’s), especially the Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS’s) have an important role in employing this.

In Finland the HEI’s have been employing entrepreneurship education in several ways during last two decades. One application of it, the Team Learning and Team Entrepreneurship study path (TLE), has been running already for fifteen years at LAB University of Applied Sciences. In three recent conference articles, the fifteen-year anniversary study for TLE was carried out by the author. The next step for the subject is to expand the state-of-the-art study of how the entrepreneurship education is employed to other selected HEI’s in Finland.

The upcoming article will study how selected HEI’s (10-15) employ entrepreneurship education in their curricula. The data will be collected with another researcher, and it will consist as follows:
- Phase 1: Exploring the HEI’s web sites, publicly available information about entrepreneurship education
- Phase 2: Theme-based interviews (8-12), interviewees will be selected based on the results gained from the phase 1. 50% of the interviewees will be the HEI’s personnel and other 50% will be the HEI’s students.

The data will be analyzed with qualitative methods utilizing instruments from both explorative and descriptive case study and grounded theory with open, axial, and selective coding phases. Both researchers will have their own viewpoint for the data, and they will do their analysis and write their article in cooperation, but mostly independently.

The primary objective for the study is to understand how the principles of entrepreneurship education are currently:
1) communicated by the Finnish HEI’s themselves on their public website, and
2) employed at Finnish HEI’s. Another objective is to recognize possibilities for future cooperation between the HEI’s to foster the deployment of the entrepreneur education.

The preliminary research question is:
- How do Finnish Higher Education Institutes (HEI’s) currently employ entrepreneurship education in their curricula?

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship education, higher education institute, qualitative study, curricula, deployment.