In a nutshell
Many educators don’t feel qualified to teach entrepreneurship, seeing it as too vague, too corporate, or just “not for them.” But the real challenge isn’t who can teach it — it’s how we help more educators feel like they can.
Entrepreneurship education is booming. Business schools have been championing it for decades, but now, universities are embedding entrepreneurship into everything from engineering to the arts. There’s just one small problem: many educators outside of business disciplines don’t feel qualified to teach it.
A recent study by Neergård and Roald (2024) dives into this issue, exploring how university educators perceive entrepreneurship and their role in teaching it. The researchers conducted focus-group interviews with 44 educators across various disciplines at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and their findings show that many faculty members see themselves as “entrepreneurial outsiders” — unqualified, uninterested, or just downright confused by the whole concept.
Basically, entrepreneurial outsiderness is when educators feel disconnected from entrepreneurship, either because the jargon makes no sense to them, it doesn’t seem relevant to their field, or they can’t shake the image of entrepreneurs as Silicon Valley tech bros. Many felt that entrepreneurship was either too vague or too corporate, and some outright admitted they’d rather someone else deal with it. One professor summed up the sentiment neatly: “I understand that there is a set of tools and things to do in an innovation process, but I don’t know anything about it. This makes it hard for me to incorporate it into my teaching.”
This raises a bit of an uncomfortable question: If so many educators don’t feel qualified to teach entrepreneurship, who actually is? The knee-jerk answer is perhaps business school faculty, but this paper challenges that assumption. The authors mean that if entrepreneurship is meant to be embedded across disciplines, it shouldn’t be confined to a business-school perspective.
Publication Date: 6 January 2025
Authors: Gunn-Berit Neergård, Gunhild Marie Roald
Institutions: Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway
Study Type: Qualitative study
Sample Size: 44 university educators across multiple disciplines, interviewed in eight focus groups
Research Focus: Investigating how university educators perceive entrepreneurship and their ability to teach it, particularly in the context of embedded entrepreneurship education.
Research Methodology: Thematic analysis of focus-group interviews, applying social identity theory to explore educators’ perceptions of entrepreneurship and their self-positioning as either “entrepreneurial outsiders” or “entrepreneurial insiders.”
Main Findings: Many educators feel like entrepreneurial outsiders, struggling to connect with entrepreneurship due to unclear terminology, lack of knowledge, and rigid stereotypes about who qualifies as an entrepreneur. Others embrace entrepreneurial insiderness by adapting entrepreneurship to their discipline, yet still face challenges due to institutional barriers and prevailing narratives. The study suggests that dismantling stereotypes and broadening the definition of entrepreneurship could make it more accessible to educators across disciplines.
Citation: Neergård, G.-B. and Roald, G.M. (2025), “Competent to teach? Educators’ perceptions of entrepreneurship”, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. Link
The study also introduces entrepreneurial insiderness, where some educators do embrace entrepreneurship — often by adapting it to fit their discipline, but even some of these “insiders” felt like impostors because they didn’t match the dominant image of an entrepreneur.
And what does that image look like? According to the study’s participants, it’s still overwhelmingly male, tech-driven, and capital-focused. One professor admitted that when asked to picture an entrepreneur, the only figures that came to mind were Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Another participant saw entrepreneurship as something meant only for engineers and startup founders, while others linked it solely to high-risk ventures or flashy tech innovations. This narrow perception fuels a cycle where only certain disciplines — and certain types of people — feel entitled to claim entrepreneurship as their own.
So, who is really qualified to teach entrepreneurship? According to this study, the better question might be: How can we help more educators feel like they are? The authors suggest that universities need to shake off these outdated stereotypes and rethink how they present entrepreneurship — making it something more people can see themselves in. Instead of treating it as a rigid, business-school export, educators could view it more broadly — as a way of creating value, solving problems, and questioning the status quo.
Until that happens, we’re left with a paradox: we want students across disciplines to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, but many of their professors don’t feel entitled to one themselves.
