How to Build an Entrepreneurial University

There is no question that entrepreneurship has had a major impact on society. Jerome Katz’s (2003) comprehensive summary of entrepreneurship education goes back to 1876. However, entrepreneurial education is a relatively new field in higher education that has proliferated since the 1970s but really took off only in the 1980s (Katz, 2003). With over 2,200 courses at over 1,600 institutions of higher learning offering classes in entrepreneurship, over 100 funded centers, 277 endowed chairs, and 44 refereed academic journals (Finkle et al., 2006), the field has made substantial progress. Membership in the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC) now numbers 200 plus (www.globalentrepreneurshipconsortium.org). The GCEC meeting held for the first time outside the United States at University College London (UCL) included 300 attendees from schools in Europe, Asia, and the United States. While a special issue on entrepreneurship education appeared in the Academy of Management Learning and Education journal in 2004, an issue on just cross-campus entrepreneurship will appear in 2014 in the Entrepreneurship Research Journal. There are entire schools of entrepreneurship, such as the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, Minnesota (http://www.stthomas.edu/Business/schulzeschool/default.html), the newly formed Turner School of Entrepreneurship at Bradley University (http://www.bradley.edu/turnerschool/), and the Spears School of Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University (http://entrepreneurship.okstate.edu), among others.