Chien Wen Yu
Since the 1980s, entrepreneurship education in the United States has become increasingly popular. The system of entrepreneurship education in the United States is characterized by relatively scientific and systemic teaching and research. The concept of ecosystems, which comes from the natural sciences, is increasingly applied to regional development and focused on inter-organizational relationships. One way to assess the ecosystems of entrepreneurship education is to consider all components of the whole – the business model, teaching philosophy, curriculum, teaching content, teacher training, infrastructure, culture, network and practices of each country. A useful tool for understanding these interrelationships is the Triple Helix Model (university-government-industry). This approach is applied in here this research to compare and analyze the ecosystems of entrepreneurship education in the United States and China, the top two economic and entrepreneurial powers in the world. Government support and industry involvement have helped to make entrepreneurship education in the U.S. successful. Compared with the U.S., entrepreneurship education has started late in China, where a pilot entrepreneurship program was launched at nine universities in April 2002. Teacher training in both entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial consultant team-building was based on the entrepreneurship education project known as Know About Business (KAB), a model created during the 1990s by the International Labor Organization (ILO) for developing countries and adopted by the All China Youth Federation in 2005. At present, China is launching a “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation” campaign and investing heavily in universities and government youth agencies. Using the Triple Helix Model, the ecosystems of the Chinese and U.S. entrepreneurship education will be compared and analyzed.