Entrepreneurship Skill Building: Focusing Entrepreneurship Education on Skills Assessment and Development

This book explores the sea change in thinking about how to educate students of entrepreneurship, uses extant theory to develop a conceptual model of entrepreneurship skill development, describes an assessment tool for operationalizing this model, discusses how this tool can be utilized to develop entrepreneurship skills, and offers examples from the application of our approach in educational settings. It concludes with implications of this methodology for furthering both entrepreneurship education and the research that shapes it. The authors present an entrepreneurship skills assessment tool, which uses a theory of measurement that breaks from psychometrics (predictive approaches) and honors the volatility and uncertainty that characterizes entrepreneurship. This assessment tool can be used to integrate curriculum and co-curricular activities to ensure skill development. Focusing on a methodology for the measurement and development of entrepreneurship skills, this book will serve as a valuable resource to researchers and students alike.

Thomas S. Lyons is the Clarence E. Harris Chair of Excellence in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Marketing & Entrepreneurship in the Gary W. Rollins College of Business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA. His research interests are entrepreneurship skills measurement and development, the relationship between entrepreneurship and community economic development and social entrepreneurship.

John S. Lyonsis the founding Director of the Center for Innovation in Population Health and a Professor of Health Management and Policy in the College of Public Health at the University of Kentucky USA. He has dedicated his career to creating strategies that effectively represent under-represented populations in policy decision-making.

Julie Samson is an entrepreneurial educator and Executive Director of the Scheinfeld Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Santa Barbara City College, where she also formerly served as Director of the regional Small Business Development Center and the Center for International Trade and Development.