A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Laura Galloway, Isla Kapasi and Geoff Whittam
literature abounds with case studies and profiling papers that explain, impact assess and often
celebrate individual entrepreneurship education initiatives (eg., Rosa, 2003; Klapper, 2004), and there
appears little doubt that the contribution entrepreneurship education can make to higher education
programmes can be valuable, whether it exists as the focus of a programme or as integrated or added
on to vocational education (eg., Keogh and Galloway, 2004; Johnson, et al., 2006). The former,
entrepreneurship-focused programmes, are usually rationalised by modern structural conditions
conducive to independent economic activity, innovation and opportunity, based on the growth in
importance of small firms. They encourage the search for an exploitation of opportunities borne of a
knowledge and service-based economy, and the development of lucrative niches, often facilitated by
that other entrepreneurship-friendly opportunity landscape, the internet (Kirby, 2004; Neck and
Greene, 2011). Similarly, the use of entrepreneurship education to foster enterprise - and enterprises
- in vocational disciplines is usually rationalised by identifying that in the modern economy, an
awareness of opportunity in one’s discipline is good for individuals who could be successful
entrepreneurs, and for industries, in that innovation and entrepreneurship contribute to the
development of the sector. However, it is widely known that innovation and sectoral development is
fostered by opportunity exploitation in large firms to a far greater extent than in small or new firms in
most vocational sectors (eg., Cooper, 1985). There is plenty of evidence that entrepreneurship has a
greater role to play and that perhaps entrepreneurship, at its opportunity-exploiting, innovative best, is
in fact not in the start-up sector at all, but in the large firms or even institutional sectors, where there is
appropriate resource, knowledge and R&D capability (Avnimelech and Feldman, 2010).
Despite this, it remains the case that entrepreneurship education can contribute value to individuals
and to industries in that it can unlock latent skills and attitudes and develop opportunity recognition
and exploitation potential. The problem for those engaged with measuring the impact of
entrepreneurship education is that most often the measurement is based on business start-up to the
exclusion of other forms of entrepreneurial behaviour, especially in-firm entrepreneurship.
Essentially, since the assumption has been that entrepreneurship is identified in studies of
entrepreneurship education as business start-up and/or self-employment, the outcome measurements
for the success (or otherwise) of entrepreneurship education is the rate of these activities. Thus, there
are methodological problems besetting entrepreneurship education impact studies – how do we know
if it has made a contribution greater than if students had taken generic business studies – or even
nothing? This brings us back, full circle, to identifying whether entrepreneurship education has
fostered entrepreneurship in the business start-up/self-employment senses again. Assuming at least
some students will select entrepreneurship education on the basis that they are already interested in
starting a firm or working for themselves, we can ask them the extent to which their entrepreneurship
education experience has helped. If they show positive results, we might extrapolate that those who
are not interested in starting firms might still have learned something that will add value to the
organisations they do eventually work in, or even prove useful as and when they find themselves
compelled to self-employment in the increasingly contracted graduate workforce (Baldry, et al., 2007).
At the same time, we can test student to find out which of them claim to want to start firms and check
if they have the background features that often have been found amongst successful entrepreneurs
and are therefore assumed to be those that shape, or at least influence, the intention and ambition for
it. From there, countless studies use the Theory of Planned Behaviour to justify, and measure the
utility of, entrepreneurship education provision (Kautonen, et al., 2011). It is to the Theory of Panned
Behaviour therefore that we now turn.
3. Theory of planned behaviour
Academic research has classified entrepreneurship as an intentional action (Arenius and Kovalainen,
2006; Patzelt and Shepherd, 2011). Therefore, research has sought to understand the motivations as
measured by intentions of those who pursue entrepreneurial activities. The most commonly used
framework for understanding behaviour based on motivations and its antecedents is the Theory of
Planned Behaviour (TPB) (Ajzen, 1991; Wiklund et al., 2003).
The TPB originated in social psychology and seeks to explain behaviour through a simple framework,
based on three antecedents: attitudes (ATT), which describe favourable or unfavourable personal
evaluations of a behaviour; social norms (SN), which describes an individual’s perceived social
pressure to engage in a particular behaviour; and, perceived behavioural control (PBC), which
describes the degree of perceived control that an individual thinks they have over achieving the end
behaviour (Ajzen, 1991). Previous research has validated each of the TPB antecedents as
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