Create student entrepreneurs

Creating student entrepreneurs refers to supporting and educating students who want to start their own business already during their study or upon their graduation. The creation of student entrepreneurs is, besides the creation of entrepeneurial skills a major important goal of entrepreneurial teaching and learning. Promoting the creation of student or graduate businesses contributes to regional development and innovation capacity.

• The term ‘student entrepreneur’ points to students who started their own company or business already during their studies or shortly upon graduation.
• Higher education institutions can support these students with special programmes and initiatives. Both can help students to translate their ideas into business plans, find investors, provide seed money or infrastructure.
• Creating student entrepreneurs aims at increasing the (regional) innovation capacity and create employment opportunities for students and other highly qualified persons.
• Supporting student to venture into their own business is a huge challenge for higher education institutions. Successful programmes and initiatives
• need to make substantial investments, e.g. providing infrastructure (laboratories, office space) and eventually seed money to start up the business;
• need to have expertise and experience in setting up companies and business;
• need to have established networks with their regional economy;
• should have set up educational modules or programmes on entrepreneurship

• Venture Creation Programmes which can be defined as: “entrepreneurship education programs which utilize the on-going creation of a real-life venture as the primary learning vessel (thus involving venture creation as part of the formal curriculum), including intention to incorporate” Lackus and Middleton (2015) analyse the types of educational programmes and mention five design principles that contribute to their success: “targeting and selecting students, creating start-up teams, collaborating with external partners, designing the learning environment, developing entrepreneurial attitudes”.
• Campus Incubators: these are organisations that are located at the boundaries of higher education institutions and link between the institution and the (regional) business sector. Main functions of such a business incubator are:
• Provide physical infrastructure for business start-ups
• Link start-ups and the (regional) business-sector through networking activities
• Supporting start-ups in their first years