WHAT DO WE TEACH IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP COURSES? A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP SYLLABI IN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES Jaehu Shim, Chung-Ang University, [email protected] Youngdu Mok, Chung-Ang University, [email protected] Boram Kim, Chung-Ang University, [email protected] Myeonggil Choi, Chung-Ang University, [email protected]

Summary: To foster potential entrepreneurs, a systematic entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities is important. However, fully systematic entrepreneurship education is not being currently conducted. The purposes of this study are to analyse the contents of the entrepreneurship education and to compare the syllabi corpus of entrepreneurship education with the research corpora of entrepreneurship and management. In this study, the co-word analysis suggested in bibliometirics is applied. The co-word analysis is a method in that a corpus is established by collecting literatures in a specific area, major concepts in the area are extracted, and the relationships among the concepts are presented and analysed as a network. We establish an EntrepreneurshipSyllabi Corpus using the 55 syllabi of undergraduate courses relating to entrepreneurship, we derive 62 major concepts, and compare these concepts with the major concepts appearing in the studies of entrepreneurship and management field. We suggest a future direction of entrepreneurship education. Keywords: entrepreneurship education, entrepreneurship syllabus, co-word analysis, bibliometrics, college and university Acknowledgement: This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) Grant funded by the Korean Government(MEST) (NRF-2010-330-B00116) 1

INTRODUCTION

For economic revitalization, the invigoration of entrepreneurship is an important policy measure. Entrepreneurship has become a slogan for the success of individuals, organizations, and even the nations (OECD, 1998; Stevenson, 2000). It has also become the key issue of policy makers, educators, and businessmen (Matlay & Westhead, 2004). The policy for the invigoration of entrepreneurship should be supported by entrepreneurship education, which can enhance the ability of entrepreneurs. This idea is based on the general view that entrepreneur is not born, but educated. Moreover, entrepreneurship is now academically justified as an individual research area by many scholars. Drucker (1985) said that the entrepreneurial ability is not magic or mysterious, but can be learned. According to Kuratko (2005), it becomes clear that entrepreneurship can be taught. Timmons (1994) argues that the education for entrepreneurs is important because entrepreneurial ability is more acquired than inherited. Most of empirical studies showed that entrepreneurship can be taught (Gorman, Hanlon & King, 1997). In order to foster potential entrepreneurs, systematic entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities is important. In line with this, both the number of colleges and universities teaching the entrepreneurship and the number of related courses opened at colleges and universities have been dramatically increasing recently. Ronstadt (1987) said that the question of “whether the entrepreneurship can be taught” is now obsolete, the more relevant question about entrepreneurship education would be “what should be taught and how should be taught.” However, a systematic entrepreneurship education is not being currently conducted due to the lack of faculties, and lack of curriculum and text development. In particular, the lack of curriculum and textbooks development makes the contents and teaching methods considerably varied depending on the professors, although they teach the same subject. In addition, the reality is that the professors teach what they can teach, rather than what they need to teach by the curriculum. To overcome this realty, a study should be conducted to objectively analyze the contents of entrepreneurial education at colleges and universities and derive the contents necessary for the systematic entrepreneurship education. Gartner & Vesper (1994) argue that the key goal of the entrepreneurship education should be differentiated from the typical education for business management, although entrepreneurship is related to business management. Describing that 2

the research areas of entrepreneurship and management are mutually independent but have common area in a certain scope, Kuratko (2005) argues that entrepreneurship emphasizes pursuing opportunity, while business management focuses more on resources and communication. In order to enhance the efficiency of entrepreneurship education, therefore, a study is needed to investigate to what extent the entrepreneurship education uses the scope of management field as its base knowledge, and to suggest which area should be differentiated from management field.

In this study, the co-word analysis suggested in bibliometirics is applied. The co-word analysis is a method in that a corpus is established by collecting literatures in a specific area, and major concepts in the area are extracted by collecting major keywords represented in the corpus, and the relationships among the extracted concepts are presented and analyzed as a network. In this study, we establish an entrepreneurship-syllabi corpus (E-S Corpus) using the 55 syllabi of undergraduate courses relating to entrepreneurship which are registered with usasbe.org as of August, 2011, and then extract the core contents of entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities from the corpus. In addition, we establish an entrepreneurship-research corpus (E-R Corpus) and management-research corpus (M-R Corpus) by collecting articles on entrepreneurship and management published between 2001 and 2010. From these corpora, we extract keywords by academic field, and then compare and analyze them with the core contents of entrepreneurship education.

The purposes of this study are to objectively analyze the contents of the current entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities by analyzing the E-S Corpus; to identify the main contents of entrepreneurship education by comparing the analyzed contents of entrepreneurship education with the E-R Corpus and M-R Corpus, and; to suggest a future direction of entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities by comparing the contents of current entrepreneurship education with the ‘Entrepreneurial Knowledge and Techniques for Entrepreneurship Education at Colleges and Universities (EK&T for EECU)’ investigated by Mok (2011). The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follow: a) What are the major concepts comprising the syllabi of the entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities? 3

b) Do the major concepts being taught at the entrepreneurship education courses at colleges and universities fully reflect the research results of entrepreneurship? c) When comparing the major concepts being taught at the entrepreneurship education courses with the EK&T for EECU, what aspect of the entrepreneurship courses at colleges and universities should be improved?

This study attempts to investigate the relationship between the contents of the current entrepreneurship education and the researches in entrepreneurship and management fields. To this end, we derive major concepts that are being taught at the entrepreneurship courses at colleges and universities, using a bibliometric analysis, which is a methodology that can objectively analyze literatures, and compare these concepts with the major concepts appearing in the researches of entrepreneurship and management field. Furthermore, we suggest what should be improved by comparing the contents of current entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities with the EK&T for EECU.

BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

In this study, we adopt co-word analysis for analyzing the conceptual structure of entrepreneurship syllabi. The co-word analysis that is applied in analyzing keywords in the syllabi is a kind of quantitative text analysis suggested in bibliometrics. Co-word analysis is, based on the co-occurrence frequency of pairs of words or phrases, used to discover linkage among subjects in a research field and thus to trace the development of science (He, 1999), this analysis is effective for analyzing the relations among terms in a specific field. Co-word analysis explains the dynamics in a field from a micro perspective (Yoo, 2003). This research is conducted based on the following procedures. First, an entrepreneurship-syllabi corpus (ES Corpus) is established, and the candidate domain terms are selected according to the frequency and the word class in the corpus. Second, the domain terms in the corpus are obtained by content analysis. Finally, the relationships among the keywords are explored by co-word analysis, and the characteristics of the keywords are verified.

In order to build an E-S Corpus, we collect the syllabi of 55 undergraduate-courses related to entrepreneurship uploaded to ‘Syllabus Exchange’ in usasbe.org. Moreover, to build an 4

entrepreneurship-research corpus (E-R Corpus) and a management-research corpus (M-R Corpus), we collect 2108 articles on entrepreneurship field and 1491 articles on management field published between 2001 and 2010 in major journals of the entrepreneurship and management fields. These journals are Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice (ETP), Journal of Business Venturing (JBV), Small Business Economics (SBE), Journal of Small Business Management (JSBM), International Small Business Journal (ISBJ), Entrepreneurship and Regional Development (ERD) in entrepreneurship field, and Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Academy of Management Review (AMR), Journal of Management (JOM) in management field. These journals are selected based upon the impact factor of the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and journal awareness. Each corpus is prepared in the following sequence. This procedure is performed with a text-analysis program T-Lab 7.2 (Lancia, 2010). a) Documents (contents of syllabi, abstracts of articles) are collected and saved onto an electronic file used for computational processing. b) Any stopwords are detected and excluded including articles (for example, ‘a’, ‘the’), prepositions, and exclamations. c) Any multi-word patterns observed in the corpus more than five times are detected and expressed as one-word terms (for example, ‘venture_capital’). Baeza-Yates et al. (1999) explain that a combination of more than two words often expresses a single concept; thus, processing the words that are closely located in a text into a single concept may be reasonable. d) A stemming or lemmatization process is undertaken that transforms any plural form of nouns or verb changes into a basic form. e) The collected text is divided into an elementary context that is a sentence unit constrained in length (maximum of 400 characters). An elementary context functions as a criterion of co-word analysis.

Table 1. Composition of Corpora Corpora

Documents

E-S Corpus E-R Corpus M-R Corpus

55 2108 1491

Elementary Contexts 497 9054 5089

Tokens

Words

Lemmas

17396 304487 159932

2618 16549 12564

2082 13469 10103 5

Table 1 shows the composition of the corpora prepared in this procedure. As shown in table 1, the entrepreneurship-syllabi corpus is composed of approximately 500 elementary contexts and 2000 lemmas (basic forms of words).

Nouns or noun phrases are selected as potential candidates for domain terms among those words that appear in the each corpus more than five times. A noun or noun phrase that is frequently found in a corpus probably becomes a domain term, but all the nouns or noun phrases not necessarily become domain terms. Thus, we request each of three experts in entrepreneurship (or management) to individually determine whether each potential candidate word is an entrepreneurship-related (or management-related) domain term or merely a general term. The selection process by experts corresponds to a coding process of quantitative content analysis that assigns a subject into a specific category. The content analysis that was applied in the selection of domain terms is a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts to the contexts of their use (Krippendorff, 2004).

RESULTS OF ANALYSIS

By selecting the domain terms of each academic field from the entrepreneurship-research corpus (E-R Corpus) and management-research corpus (M-R Corpus), 149 keywords were extracted as entrepreneurship field and 243 keywords as management field. The number of major keywords extracted from the entrepreneurship-syllabi corpus (E-S Corpus) was 62. The relationship between these 62 keywords and the domain terms by field is as follow: 21 keywords including ‘business’ and ‘market’ fall under both fields of entrepreneurship and management, 16 keywords including ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘family business’ fall only under the field of entrepreneurship, 19 keywords including ‘management’ and ‘organization’ fall only under the field of management, and six keywords including ‘business plan’ and ‘business concept’ do not fall under any of those two fields.

Table 2 shows the relationship between the keywords appearing in the E-S Corpus and the domain terms by each academic field. As shown in the table, the percentage share of keywords falling under the domain terms of both entrepreneurship and management fields (21 keywords and 41.4% share) is the highest. When comparing the keywords falling only 6

under the domain terms of management (lower right of Table 2) and those of entrepreneurship fields (upper left of Table 2), the number of keywords appearing in the E-S Corpus is greater in the field of management than entrepreneurship (19 keywords vs. 16 keywords). However, when taking the frequency of each keyword into account, the share shows greater in the field of entrepreneurship than management (31.1% v. 20.2%).

Yes No

Domain Terms of Entrepreneurship Research

Table 2. Terms in Entrepreneurship-Syllabi Corpus and Domain Terms by Academic Field Domain Terms of Management Research No Yes change, entrepreneur, entrepreneurial assessment, behavior, benefit, activity, entrepreneurial process, business, company, competitive entrepreneurship, family business, advantage, competitor, cost, decision franchise, franchising, franchisor, idea, making, economy, growth, innovation, opportunity, risk, small business, social investor, leader, leadership, market, entrepreneurship, uncertainty, venture owner, resource, start-up, strategy, creation venture (16 keywords, share 31.3%) (21 keywords, share 41.4%) business concept, account, agency, balance, client, business management, business plan, communication, corporation, customer, entrepreneurial marketing, demand, effectiveness, efficiency, family enterprise, teamwork employee, enterprise, firm, investment, management, manager, organization, product, supplier (6 keywords, share 7.4%) (19 keywords, share 20.2%) * The percentage share reflects the frequency of each keyword

To find out the similarity between the E-S Corpus and the research corpus by field, we present the frequency of co-occurrence among major keywords of each corpus as matrix, and calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient among this matrix. Since the correlation coefficient varies depending on how many keywords are extracted from each corpus, it does not have absolute meaning. However, it is meaningful to compare the relative difference among the correlation coefficients obtained in the same method. The analysis of 70 keywords from each corpus indicates that while the correlation coefficient of the E-R Corpus and M-R Corpus was statistically significant with 0.261 (p < 0.001), the correlation coefficient of the E-S Corpus and E-R Corpus is 0.099 and that of the E-S Corpus and M-R Corpus is 0.092, which are not statistically significant. This result comes from the fact that many of research terms appearing in the studies of entrepreneurship or management do not appear in the syllabi of the entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities. It also results from the fact that 7

there are some terms appearing in the syllabi of the entrepreneurship education, but not in individual study field.

By comparing the major 62 keywords extracted from the E-S Corpus with the ‘Entrepreneurial Knowledge and Techniques for Entrepreneurship Education at Colleges and Universities (EK&T for EECU)’ investigated by Mok (2011), an improvement measure for the entrepreneurship curriculum can be derived. This study maps the major 62 keywords extracted from the syllabi of the current undergraduate schools with the contents of EK&T for EECU, and derive an improvement measure for the entrepreneurship curriculum at colleges and universities. Using Delphi survey on the entrepreneurship research group and the practitioner expert group, and the AHP survey analysis, Mok derived four areas, 25 knowledge and technique factors that should be taught in the entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities, and then analyzed the significance of each factors. The four derived areas: 1) analysis of entrepreneurial environment and exploration of entrepreneurial opportunity; 2) development of business concept; 3) development of entrepreneurial mindset and ability, and; 4) startup and growth.

We investigated how the 25 EK&T for EECU are related to the 62 major keywords extracted from the E-S Corpus. The result showed that one necessary knowledge or technique was relevant with 4.88 keywords on average. However, there was no related keyword found both in ‘new technology trend and the analysis of new business trend’ in the area of 1) analyzing entrepreneurial environment and exploring entrepreneurial opportunity, and ‘networking establishment and utilization’ in the area of 3) developing entrepreneurial mindset and ability.

CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATION

To foster potential entrepreneurs, a systematic entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities is important. In order to design a systematic entrepreneurship education, identifying the major contents of entrepreneurship education by objectively analyzing the current syllabi of entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities is necessary. Furthermore, it is also necessary to find out how the contents of entrepreneurship education at 8

colleges and universities utilize the academic achievements of entrepreneurship and management fields. Based on these needs, this study aimed to suggest the future direction of entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities by: identifying the major contents of entrepreneurship education by objectively analyzing the contents of current entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities through co-word analysis; evaluating and comparing the identified contents with the research results of entrepreneurship and management, and; comparing the contents with the necessary knowledge suggested by the experts. The co-word analysis applied in this study is a representative bibliometic methodology that objectively analyzes the literatures in a specific field. While the analysis of literatures, including education contents and research results in the entrepreneurship field, has depended on the subject criteria of the researchers, this study applied a differentiated methodology from the existing studies.

The conclusion and implications of this study are as follow. The number of major keywords extracted from the 55 entrepreneurship syllabi analyzed was 62. Of these keywords, the percentage of domain terms falling under both entrepreneurship field and management field is the highest (41.4%). This result corresponds to the Kuratko’s (2005) argument that the research areas of entrepreneurship and management are mutually independent but have common area in certain scope. Even though the number of keywords is greater in the domain terms of management than entrepreneurship field (19 keywords vs. 16 keywords), when taking the frequency of each keyword into account, the share of domain terms in the entrepreneurship field is greater than management field (31.1% vs. 20.2%). This result can be interpreted that even though a variety of management related terms appear in the syllabi at colleges and universities, these terms are only used as supplementary concepts to explain the core concepts of entrepreneurship, rather than core concepts of management. As a result, it can be said that the subjects of entrepreneurship is gradually evolving as an independent field utilizing the results of entrepreneurship research, although it was originated from management field. Attention should be given to such concepts as ‘business plan’, ‘business concept’, and ‘entrepreneurial marketing,’ which appear in the entrepreneurship syllabi, but not in the domain terms of entrepreneurship or management. This is because these concepts are a part of the areas that have not been actively studied, although those concepts are important in entrepreneurship education and practice. We compared the major 62 keywords 9

with the ‘Entrepreneurial Knowledge and Techniques for Entrepreneurship Education at Colleges and Universities (EK&T for EECU)’ investigated by Mok (2011). The result indicates that there were almost no related keywords found both in ‘new technology trend and the analysis of new business trend’ in the area of analyzing entrepreneurial environment and exploring entrepreneurial opportunity, and ‘networking establishment and utilization’ in the area of developing entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ability. Considering that these two areas have been evaluated by the experts as very important areas in the entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities, it is urgent to supplement these contents for the entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities.

The limitation of this study and future research direction are as follow: First, this study conducted analysis for the 55 syllabi of undergraduate courses relating to entrepreneurship, which are registered with usasbe.org as of August, 2011. Considering the number of entrepreneurship courses opened in the colleges and universities all across the world, however, the 55 syllabi analyzed in this study are not sufficient enough as a sample. Therefore, it is necessary in the future to collect and analyze more syllabi from various regions. It is also necessary to analyze the characteristics that are linked with the economic development stage of the regions. Second, this study extracted and suggested 62 major keywords by analyzing the syllabi to objectively analyze the current entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities. However, it could not find out the relationship among the keywords. It is necessary in the future to investigate the relationship among the major concepts of entrepreneurship education through the qualitative analysis including the content analysis by experts, as well as the quantitative analysis including clustering and pathfinder analysis. Third, this study suggested an improvement measure for the current entrepreneurship education by comparing the current entrepreneurship education at colleges and universities with the EK&T for EECU. However, because the comparison depended on the evaluation by the experts, there is a possibility that the result can be different depending on the evaluators. Therefore, it is required to apply a methodology that can ensure the objectivity of comparison process.

REFERENCES

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Baeza-Yates, R. (1999). In B. d. A. N. Ribeiro (Ed.), Modern information retrieval. Harlow: Addison-Wesley. Drucker, P. F. (1985). Innovation and entrepreneurship. New York: Harper & Row. Gartner, W. B. & Vesper, K. H. (1994). Experiments in Entrepreneurship Education: Success and Failures. Journal of Business Venturing, 9(3), 179-187. Gorman, G., Hanlon, D., & King, W. (1997). Some Research Perspectives on Entrepreneurship Education, Enterprise Education and Education for Small Business Management: A Ten-year Literature Review. International Small Business Journal, 15(3), 56-77. He, Q. (1999). Knowledge Discover Through Co-Word Analysis, Library Trends, 48(1), 133159. Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology (2nd. ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE. Kuratko, D. F. (2005). The Emergence of Entrepreneurship Education: Development, Trends, and Challenges. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 29(5), 577-597. Lancia, F. (2010). T-LAB Pro 7.2 user’s manual. Roccasecca: T-LAB. Matlay, H. & Westhead, P. (2004). From E-innovation to E-entrepreneurship: European Perspectives, The 27th ISBA National Small Firms Policy and Research Conference. University of Teesside. Mok, Y. (2011). A Study on the entrepreneurship curriculum development model designed to systemize entrepreneurship education in undergraduate school, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Chung-Ang University. OECD (1998). Fostering entrepreneurship, organisation for economic cooperation and development. Paris: OECD. Rondstadt, R. (1987). The Educated Entrepreneurs: A New Era of Entrepreneurial Education is Beginning, American Journal of Small Business, 11(4), 37-53. Stevenson, H. H. (2000). Why Entrepreneurship Has Won? Coleman White Paper. USASBE National Conference. Chicago, IL: Coleman Foundation. Timmons, J. A. (1994). New venture creation: Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century. Burr Ridge, Il: Irwin. Yoo, Y. (2003). A study on intellectual structure of library and information science in Korea. Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 20(3), 277-298. 11