Entrepreneurial Education in Germany Jutta Günther, Ilka Ritter IWH ...

1. Introduction
Entrepreneurial education is becoming more and more important for higher education
institutions (HEI) in Germany since the 1980s. Before, entrepreneurial education was hardly
available. If at all it was carried out by chambers of commerce, professional associations etc.
But since the 1980s, academia has discovered the field, and universities as well as universities
of applied sciences (Fachhochschulen) provide an increasing number of courses on
entrepreneurship. Finally, the first chair for entrepreneurship was established in Germany in
1997. Today, more than 50 active entrepreneurship chairs exist at German higher education
institutions.
An important organization for research on entrepreneurial education in Germany is the
Förderkreis Gründungsforschung e.V. (Society for the Promotion of Entrepreneurship
Research, FGF). The FGF, besides other activities, runs a periodic survey on entrepreneurship
chairs in Germany (since 1998).
One major challenge as regards the implementation of a survey for Germany is the very dense
network of higher education institutions. In Germany, according to the Federal Statistical
Office, in 2006/07 exist 383 higher education institutions. 1 It would have been impossible
within the scope of this project to screen such a large number of institutions from scratch. In
order to keep things feasible, and in order to make use of existing survey material, we took
the FGF database on entrepreneurship chairs as a starting point. The FGF has a list of
entrepreneurship chairs (active chairs, vacant chairs, planned chairs). We restricted our survey
to those higher education institutions which have at least one actively operating
entrepreneurship chair (HEI with vacant and planned chairs hardly offer information on
courses, target group etc.). Our decision to include only HEI with an active entrepreneurship
chair is of course a pragmatic approach, and one has to be aware that there exist HEI
providing courses in the field of entrepreneurship, but not having an entrepreneurship chair. 2
At the time we run the survey (March – April 2007), we identified 49 higher education
institutions (HEI) with at least one actively operating entrepreneurship chair. We took these
HEI from the FGF list of entrepreneurship chairs (see www.fgf-ev.de; Map of
Entrepreneurship Chairs). 3 We greatly thank the FGF for support and cooperation. From the
FGF we also obtained data on the “faculty” to which the chair belongs, on the chair’s
1 Source: http://www.destatis.de/basis/d/biwiku/hochtab1.php; The number of 383 includes 6 teacher training
colleges (Pädagogische Hochschulen), 15 colleges of theology (Theologische Hochschulen), and 53 colleges of
art (Kunsthochschulen). So, even if we would exclude them, the number remains very high.
2 The FGF offers a list of more than 30 so-called “entrepreneurship-affiliated” chairs, but this is explicitly an
exemplary and selective list. The recent publication of Achleitner et al. (2007) identifies 45 entrepreneushipaffiliated
chairs in Germany. However, it remains difficult to generate a reliable list of HEI providing
entrepreneurial education in Germany.
3
We excluded those HEI where an existing entrepreneurship chair is vacant and those where an entrepreneurship
chair is planned, but not yet realized.
3