Exploring Relationships Between Entrepreneurship Education and Students’ Entrepreneurial Intentions: A Mixed Method Study of Entrepreneurial Pedagogies at Chilean Universities

Entrepreneurs play a major role in the 21st century economy, especially in developing countries such as Chile. Entrepreneurial individuals generate innovative ideas, create jobs, and push older businesses to improve competitiveness. To encourage entrepreneurial skills and mindset among the next generation of students, different public and private initiatives have started to include entrepreneurship education (EE) in all levels of education, especially in higher education. Nowadays, EE is not only about business creation, it is about educating individuals to be capable of creating opportunities using entrepreneurial skills to deal with complex and uncertain environments. Yet, while much is known about how entrepreneurs not only create social, environmental, and economic value, the entrepreneurial process is still not understood well enough. This lack of understanding limits our ability to teach entrepreneurship. The purpose of this mixed methods study was twofold: (1) to explore relationships between faculty teaching perspectives, the experience of the faculty and student entrepreneurial intentions in required entrepreneurship courses at Chilean universities. From this information, I identified those faculty who seem to have differential impact on students entrepreneurial intentions (Phase I: quantitative, secondary data), and (2) to describe and explain how the entrepreneurship faculty define and think about entrepreneurship education and teaching methods (Phase II: qualitative, primary data). This study found that the required entrepreneurship courses in a Chilean university had no impact on student entrepreneurial intentions. However, the study also showed that faculty entrepreneurial experience might be a factor that impacts student entrepreneurial intentions. The qualitative part of the study indicated that while faculty hold a perspective in which entrepreneurship is more than simply business creation and are already using some "learning through" entrepreneurship pedagogical elements, but are still primarily basing classes on "learning for" entrepreneurship strategies such as business plan development.