Educating for Entrepreneurial Leadership: From Didacticism to Co-creation

Entrepreneurial leadership promotes organisational competitive advantage and innovation resulting in increased attention on entrepreneurial leadership development. Many higher education institutions (HEIs) claim to develop entrepreneurial leaders. However, knowledge of how to facilitate entrepreneurial leadership development is limited, the effectiveness of development practices is contestable, and current understanding of the phenomenon is mostly conceptual. We address this void by exploring educators’ perspectives of entrepreneurial leadership development and consider how the phenomenon is facilitated. We employ Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as our research methodology and analyse the data following IPA data analysis guidance. Findings signify the importance of placing strong emphasis on co-creating education experience with wider stakeholder involvement, thereby forming an entrepreneurial community which works collectively over the longer-term to facilitate entrepreneurial leadership development. The findings also reveal the pedagogic significance of facilitating supportive learning conditions and ‘handholding,’ a broader form of support which contradicts the established notion of ‘independent learners’ thereby challenging current ontologies around ‘student support’ when facilitating entrepreneurial leadership development.