Chapter 4 Linking Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Higher Education: A Study of Swedish Schools of Entrepreneurship

This chapter focuses on Swedish university students studying entrepreneurship and establishing new firms. It is well known that the establishment of new firms is important for economic growth, innovation and job creation. For quite some time, public debate and policy initiatives, as well as research, have focused on how to improve growth of new firms. More than 30 years of entrepreneurship research reveal, however, that differences in personality traits provide little explanation of why some entrepreneurs are more successful than others. Instead, it is suggested that it is the behaviour of individuals that make them entrepreneurial, and that this behaviour is influenced by experience and learning (Gustafsson, 2004; Politis, 2005). The question is thus whether entrepreneurship education will influence the entrepreneurial behaviour of students.