Analyzing Educators' Perspectives on the Effects of Entrepreneurship Education on Students' Entrepreneurial Intentions

Understanding the effects of entrepreneurship education on students' entrepreneurial intentions is essential to improve effectiveness and complementarity of entrepreneurship education programs. Accordingly, a multitude of researches has attempted to capture such effects by surveying students under various sampling frames. And while great insights have been harnessed from such efforts, these remained limited by their short term perspective, and by a multitude of conflicting evidence. This paper attempts to find out the reason for previous inconclusive results within the field by examining the effects of entrepreneurship education on students' entrepreneurial intentions from the educators' perspective. Doing so, the authors engage in theory development through comparative qualitative cross-case analysis of educators from Norway and Russia. The analysis results in a detailed theoretical model. The model was refined by exploring the perspective of educators rather than students, doing so qualitatively rather than quantitatively; both allowing a broader and longer term perspective, anchored in experience and theory. Moreover, the different historical preconditions of entrepreneurship in both Norway and Russia have affected people's entrepreneurial intentions and the outcomes of the entrepreneurship education programs aiming to increase these intentions. Hence, a comparative approach allowed authors to identify factors that depend on cultural and socio-economic conditions of the two countries, and moderate entrepreneurship education - entrepreneurial intentions relations. Finally, the authors discuss practical implications, limitations and directions for future research. Overall, the model, research design and context taken together represent the contribution of the study.