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It has for long been argued that entrepreneurship demands a different pedagogical approach, which is action-oriented and experiential. However, learning through and from experience is not only to engage in action – as the fundaments for grasping actions taken has been positioned as a triangulation between the experiences gained, the conceptual knowledge that could explain the action, and reflective thinking. This in turn creates a bridge between theory and practice to develop knowledge and insights for future learning. This chapter adopts a mixed-method approach based on a dominant and simultaneous design, where the qualitative data in the form of reflective diaries are dominant, but complimented by a pre-, mid- and post-survey on reflective thinking. The study provides evidence of the importance to develop abilities of reflective thinking for developing entrepreneurial knowing when adopting an experience-based pedagogy. The study acknowledge a pattern for developing reflective thinking, based on developing conceptual understanding early in the learning process, which is then used to develop skills from the entrepreneurial experiences gained. Through development of reflective thinking the students develop self-awareness and are able to apply and adopt theoretical insights to actions taken, and as a result increase their abilities to take intelligent actions in future uncertain situations.

Research studying the impact of entrepreneurship education and training (EET) has grown rapidly over the past two decades, but the literature has limitations in clarity and depth due to methodological weaknesses in study design and analysis, a lack of theoretical grounding, and use of inconsistent variables for tracking EET outcomes over time. We highlight the specific weaknesses of the literature, argue for the theory of planned behaviour as a grounding theory, outline a plan for improving future EET research, and provide an example study to demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed model. In so doing, we contribute to efforts that seek to provide more rigour and relevance in EET scholarship and practice.

To move forward as researchers interested in contributing to the (European) political debate on entrepreneurial competence, on the one hand, and conducting sound scientific research, on the other, we argue that it is time for researchers to move to the next level of entrepreneurial competence research. Therefore, this chapter discusses two important aspects associated with the concept of entrepreneurial competence, namely the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ question. Both questions seem to be common sense, but interestingly the fundaments behind these two questions receive limited attention in the entrepreneurship education (EE) literature. Concerning the ‘what’ question, to prevent the generation of endless lists of competencies we propose to cluster entrepreneurial competencies in four competence domains, including a cognition-orientated, function-oriented, social-oriented and meta-oriented domain. To illustrate the power of using this framework we discuss specific research that has been done on opportunity identification competence, social competence and moral competence. Concerning the ‘how’ question we invite EE research to embrace modern educational design principles that will help to develop targeted theoretical frameworks that direct empirical intervention studies in EE. Examples of pedagogical approaches discussed in this chapter that incorporate modern education principles come from problem-based learning, project-based learning, student-centred learning environments and boundary crossing theory.

We have started formulating and simulating the lifecycle of knowledge-driven (that would include technology-driven) ventures that can be viewed as the exercise of real options under regimes of risk and uncertainty that is modeled in the form of “happy accidents” namely, strategic knowledge serendipity, arbitrage and acquisition events that punctuate the process of the venture’s lifecycle. In practical terms, we find that the timing, selection and sequencing of key decisions pertaining to new venture formation and evolution are contingent in a non-linear manner to the breadth and depth as well as the quality and density of the network structure of the business and technology ecosystem within which a venture is situated. We find that up to a certain point of cultivating and nurturing the new firm’s “socio-economic” network, the costs outweigh the benefits but with an abrupt about-face once a critical mass in the scale, scope and quality of this “socio-economic” network or business and technology ecosystem is attained when the benefits start outweighing and exponentially exceeding the costs.

In this chapter, Matthias Wenzel and Jochem Koch develop conceptual arguments on what and how accelerators accelerate. Based on the literature on strategy process, they draw two conceptual distinctions that relate to the object of acceleration (strategic core versus strategic periphery) and the processual patterns of acceleration (forwarding versus leaping). They then use these distinctions to conceptualize and discuss four ways in which accelerators can accelerate the business development of new ventures. They argue that start-up acceleration seems to be largely aimed at forwarding and leaping the strategic periphery instead of the strategic core. This chapter extends the emerging literature on accelerators by making the case for considering and examining start-up acceleration as a process and offering a more specific and nuanced understanding of how it occurs.

In this chapter, Massimo Colombo, Cristina Rossi-Lamastra and Mike Wright set out an agenda for future research on accelerators. They suggest that the agenda for future research is multi-leveled, involving the accelerators and their programs as well as the firms, entrepreneurs and mentors involved. As accelerators operate in a range of different contexts, a future research agenda needs to consider the dimensions of these contexts. As accelerators are a rapidly evolving phenomenon, there is also the imperative to consider the time dimension with respect to life-cycle issues.

In this chapter, Laurens Vandeweghe and Trent Fu provide a micro-lens on business accelerators’ governance practices by examining how accelerators manage their external networks and internal organizations to achieve their organizational goals. As such, they look both at how accelerators coordinate autonomous stakeholders such as sponsors, partners, investors and portfolio companies within a network form of governance and at how accelerators are monitored and controlled internally to preside over the day-to-day activities by organizational governance mechanisms. They classify accelerators based on their sponsorship (i.e. corporate, private, public), indicating that such sponsorship differences influence the ways in which accelerators are governed both from an external-network perspective and from an internal organizational perspective, and illustrate this by applying this dual perspective to the cases of AppCampus, Techstars and Start-Up Chile.