A Learning-by-Doing Approach to Entrepreneurship Education: Evidence from a Short Intensive Online International Program

Alessandra Colombelli, Andrea Panelli and Francesco Serraino
Additional contact information
Andrea Panelli: Department of Management and Production Engineering and Entrepreneurship and Innovation Centre (EIC), Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24, 10129 Turin, Italy
Francesco Serraino: Department of Management and Production Engineering and Entrepreneurship and Innovation Centre (EIC), Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24, 10129 Turin, Italy

Administrative Sciences, 2022, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-27

Abstract: Entrepreneurship is considered a key driver for economic growth. Therefore, more and more studies are investigating the role and effectiveness of entrepreneurship education. In this context, the present study is aimed at investigating the effectiveness of entrepreneurship programs, with a learning-by-doing approach, on the entrepreneurial intention, entrepreneurial characteristics (entrepreneurial attitude, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, entrepreneurial mindset, core self-evaluation) and entrepreneurial skills (creativity, financial literacy, marshaling of resources, planning, teamwork). The study has analyzed a short intensive online entrepreneurship program, which adopts a learning-by-doing approach and targets students from different European technical universities, with different levels of education and different entrepreneurial backgrounds, giving them the opportunity to work on different types of projects. Pre- and post-course surveys were conducted in order to perform qualitative analyses on the effectiveness of the program. The results show that the entrepreneurial intention and perception of the entrepreneurial characteristics and skills of the students increased after participation in the program. In addition, our findings reveal that the program appears to be more effective for MSc students than for PhD ones and for students who had never attended any entrepreneurship program before, while there is no difference in the effectiveness of the program in terms of gender.

Keywords: entrepreneurship education; student entrepreneurship; learning-by-doing; entrepreneurial learning; entrepreneurial intention; entrepreneurial skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L M M0 M1 M10 M11 M12 M14 M15 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/12/1/16/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/12/1/16/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jadmsc:v:12:y:2022:i:1:p:16-:d:730215

Access Statistics for this article

Administrative Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Nancy Ma

More articles in Administrative Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().