Entrepreneurship Education – Academic Acceptance and Effective Classroom Strategies and Methodologies. Introduction to the Special Issue
JAMES ANTHONY SWAIM, MARK S. HIATTABSTRACT. Successful academic entrepreneurship programs create and perpetuate an environment that fosters student deep thinking, experimentation, observation, and reflection as a means of instigating creativity and action into economic and program development. To support this environment, educational focus must be broad and include entrepreneurial orientation in a variety of settings including new venture creation, social stewardship, family business, government operations, and corporate endeavors. To this end, the goal for any learning institution should be to create a student entrepreneurial mindset and spirit. This special issue of The American Journal of Entrepreneurship amplifies this goal by offering a broad, interdisciplinary dialogue with an emphasis on outlining and defining the challenges of instructing entrepreneurship as a formal academic discipline as well as highlighting effective classroom pedagogy. As such, our purpose as guest editors was to add to the entrepreneurship literature by soliciting and managing the review of empirical and conceptual papers, and book and article reviews, from various disciplines, including business administration, engineering, liberal arts, science, mathematics, and performing arts. We hope our selections achieve our purpose.