Entrepreneurship education: Ireland's solution to economic regeneration?

The significance of entrepreneurship has come into sharper focus as enterprise and innovation are being flagged as solutions to regenerate the Irish economy. The Irish Innovation Task Force believes that Ireland could become an 'innovation hub', attracting foreign risk capital and international and indigenous entrepreneurs to start and grow companies in Ireland. To realize these ambitions, Ireland needs to create a favourable and stable ecosystem for entrepreneurs through policy, tax, regulation, supply of finance, education and R&D. Irish higher education institutions are being exhorted to play a pivotal role in the development of an enterprise culture through entrepreneurship education (EE) and the production of graduate entrepreneurs. If HEIs are to contribute to Ireland's economic recovery they need to produce graduates capable of applying their knowledge to start and grow their own businesses. Existing paradigms provide an inadequate understanding of the complexities inherent in the provision of entrepreneurship education in Irish HEIs and its role in producing greater numbers of graduate entrepreneurs. There is a need to bridge the credibility gap between government expectations and harsh entrepreneurial realities to determine whether EE is having a positive impact on graduate enterprise development. This paper focuses on EE in Irish higher education and addresses the difficulty of measuring its effectiveness in producing graduate entrepreneurs.