A comparative study of entrepreneurship education policy making areas

Entrepreneurship policy making in different countries with different degrees of development show a range of diverse policies such as financial support, innovation, technical and consulting, SME development, legislation, administration, employment and training situation. The purpose of this research was to discover creative areas, successful experiences and operational for policy making in entrepreneurship education for a country such as Iran with talent human capital. A mixed research method was chosen for this study. Procedural method for the qualitative part was analytic agreement comparative with comparative study approach in 23 selected countries. In quantitative portion, the Structural Equation Modeling with partial least squares approach was used. The results showed that entrepreneurship education policy could be classified in 4 categories: 1) capacity building and enriching education environment with explanatory power of 54%, 2) education in entrepreneurship (training of potential entrepreneurs) 28%, 3) education for entrepreneurship (training of actual entrepreneurs) 18% and 4) education about entrepreneurship (training of entrepreneurial researchers and consultants) 13%. There was a significant difference in developing and developed countries in the third and fourth categories. Based on this research finding we suggested some policies such as reinventing entrepreneurship education at schools with an emphasis on the senior years of high school, training new skills to entrepreneurs and employees of SME, the unemployed and rural empowerment, interdisciplinary entrepreneurship education in all academic disciplines by using new educational technologies and participation of all stakeholders, especially the private sector and NGOs.