The road to excellence in international entrepreneurship education: Further analysis of the original 2005 article

This chapter is based on my original article (Mitchell, 2005), where I attempted to demonstrate (using some then recently developed border-spanning cognition-based entrepreneurship theory), that as a global society we have in certain ways been wrong in our approach to entrepreneurship education, and that as a result, entrepreneurship education as an engine of global value creation might be ‘ready for a tune-up’ (2005: 187). Using an entrepreneurial cognitions-based argument, I argued (based upon my previous cross-cultural research into entrepreneurial expert scripts) (for example, Mitchell et al., 2000, 2002, and others) that international entrepreneurship education is more about creating the border-crossing entrepreneurial cognitions that are universally present in entrepreneurs - based upon developing the same model in a variety of settings - versus trying to develop differing models to match setting variety. Global entrepreneurship can thus be defined to be: the capability to create new and valuable transactions anywhere on the globe (Mitchell, 2003). In the original article, after presenting some brief background, I therefore outlined the relationship between education and value creation, to support the argument that while entrepreneurs are special, creating them is general - that there is, in actuality, a commonly available process for creating the entrepreneurial expertise that has in the past been viewed to be an uncommon and inaccessible process. I then proceeded to present and discuss the international implications of the emerging ‘deliberate-practice school’ of entrepreneurship education for the creation of global entrepreneurs.