A structure for promoting entrepreneurship education: Understanding the interactions within the entrepreneurial ecosystem

Despite extensive investigations into the impact of entrepreneurship education (EE), only a few studies have focused on the impact of the antecedents of entrepreneurship education (EE) and their combined effects. Based on an entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective, we concentrate on country-level factors influencing entrepreneurship education (EE, social and cultural norms, infrastructure, ease of entry, R&D transfers, government policy, entrepreneurial finance, government entrepreneurial programs). We applied fsQCA to investigate the impact of the interactions between the above factors on the development of entrepreneurship education (EE). We used a dataset from the latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), including data from 50 economies in the Entrepreneurship Framework 2021. Our findings suggest that the development of global entrepreneurship education (EE) under the COVID-19 was characterised by a focus on R&D transfer, including the provision of infrastructure and funding for R&D transfer. Based on this, three configurational pathways can achieve high performing entrepreneurship education (EE), including a policy-project combination configuration, a policy-deficit configuration and a government-project-deficit configuration.