Page 192 - 1-Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development by Norman Walzer (z-lib.org)

Effective Entrepreneurship Education Programs 181

Interaction between full-time teachers and external partners has the ancil-
lary benefit of increasing the teachers’ knowledge about entrepreneurship
and their capacity to become better coaches and mentors.

Conclusion
Establishment of an entrepreneurship education program does not guar-
antee either generation of successful entrepreneurs or a community’s eco-
nomic sustainability and growth. Lack of such programs, however, greatly
increases the odds against realizing either of these outcomes. In other
words, entrepreneurship programs at all levels of the educational contin-
uum are about giving young people the following chances:

• To recognize the personal and professional rewards associated with an
entrepreneurial lifestyle.
• To know the satisfaction of creating value or of addressing an eco-
nomic or social need.
• To understand the difference between ideation and execution, and to
appreciate why some individuals can turn an idea into a new product
or service while others only talk about having ideas.
• To explore their own entrepreneurial potential. A career in which indi-
viduals must set their own deadline and create their own motivation is
not for everyone. Learning these lessons at an early age can save years
of frustration and disappointment later in life.
• To begin building a social network that will help them immediately
and throughout their professional and personal lives.
• To comprehend that entrepreneurial leadership is as much about
knowing one’s weaknesses as it is about knowing one’s strengths.
• To pursue a passion. Above all, entrepreneurship empowers every indi-
vidual to define and pursue those things that are truly important to them.

Finally, we continuously talk about education expenditures as investments
in our children’s future. For many struggling towns and cities, especially
those in rural areas, this personal and financial investment often represents
“anti-investment” to our communities since many youth believe they must
leave their hometowns to take advantage of their educations. For these
youth, out-migration from their hometowns is not a matter of choice but
an economic necessity.
Entrepreneurship education can potentially reverse this trend by instilling
the confidence in young people that they do have a future in their native com-
munities—not as a result of employment by an absentee employer or depen-
dence on resource-based industries such as mining. An effective entrepre-
neurship education program, while not guaranteeing economic success, does