In this study we focus on entrepreneurship education, entrepreneurs’ professional identity and related cross-cultural issues 1. Today’s global business requires professional identities that are flexible and broad-mind, and this is why teaching should recognize these challenges. There is a need for new skills such as generalist skills, social skills and abilities for creating and sustaining new, complex trust-based business networks. We believe entrepreneurship education can promote such abilities. The entrepreneurs-to-be also need ethical rules and codes as they build values and ethical understanding, all rooted in identity. Recently, researchers such as Rae 2 have stressed the need for entrepreneurship education with a strong emphasis on sustainability and responsibility.
The research of entrepreneurship education is related to current policy, and should be understood in this context 3. Recent advances in theory building in cross-cultural management hold to a dynamic vision of culture and communication 4. In our study, culture is approached in generic terms, even if interpreted in the context of a national culture. Entrepreneurship must have dynamic characteristics in order to adapt to political and economic changes. For an individual within a specific national culture, his/her behavior and values are affected not only by the national culture, but also organizational culture (if a member of an organization), group culture (if a member of a group) and global culture 5. The influence of the different levels of culture depends on the context and the individual. Communication is usually seen to be at the center of culture. Differing communication rules, for instance, in the West and East also have an impact on networks. Although important, it seems that this kind of dynamic approach is still quite rare in entrepreneurship training and research.
The identities of business actors need to evolve from the current circumstances and ways of working: who am I as an entrepreneur, with whom do I work and network, and from whom do I get my insights for the future. The identity that business professionals develop is of importance to their entrepreneurship, and it transforms in the cultural context that they connect to and the social groups in society that they professionally relate to. Education creates a kind of mind-set in the course of the lifelong schooling process. Although young people might receive a good academic education they lack preparation for working life and its competitive environment. Job insecurity has increased and unemployment rates among young people remain high. Entrepreneurship education has been criticized as being overly practice-orientated and affording too little space for recognizing opportunities and development abilities in students, which would be necessary for the promotion of creativity 6. As noted by Kyrö 7, the learning paradigm in universities is not supportive of entrepreneurship, since the traditional and the entrepreneurial mind-set require different educational approaches. Small business provides an excellent employment opportunity for young people, but requires new skills and identities to be learnt that are not offered in earlier school education. Entrepreneurship education that equips students with the abilities needed in this complex interaction between competitive environments and business is required.
The entrepreneurial processes in establishing new enterprises require different kinds of skills than those needed when working in existing stable circumstances. There are many questions to be solved; such as, when should people start learning about running an enterprise and what should the content of such courses be? In general, it is the combination of knowledge, skills and various personal qualities that is important. The socialization of our personality is influenced by the ambient culture, group and social relations within a given society and is dependent on individual experiences. People mostly maintain the values they have acquired by the age of 20, and those adopted at an early age have a stronger influence than those adopted later in life 8. Skills such as those for communication are equally important; that is, the ability to communicate novel ideas and to listen and respect other people’s opinions. Such skills can also be developed later through education in entrepreneurship programs. The described tendencies apply to the business environment and management education worldwide, even if there are also country-specific ways of coping with these issues.
Nowadays there has evolved several new approaches to being enterprising, such as social entrepreneurship, and this all means learning new ways to be entrepreneurs. This assumes a new perspective on entrepreneurship, challenging its basic assumptions. Social entrepreneurship deals with broad social, cultural, and environmental goals, and is commonly associated with the voluntary and not-for-profit sectors; therefore, it also challenges the conventional business-oriented entrepreneurial identity.
In this paper we explore how research on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education worldwide has taken account of the new requirements for flexible entrepreneurial identities, and what are the essential elements of recent high-quality research and what can be learnt from this for the future.
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