Towards a conceptual understanding of entrepreneurial learning

Towards a conceptual understanding ofentrepreneurial learning

David Rae and Mary CarswellDerbyshire Business School, University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby, DE22 1GB, UK

Tel: +44 (0)1332 591400; Fax: +44 (0)1332 622741; E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Submitted: 5th October, 1999; Amended: 28th June, 2000; Accepted: 19th July, 2000

ABSTRACTThis paper summarises the conclusions fromresearch which explores how people learn entrepre-neurial behaviour. Although learning can be saidto have a critical role in entrepreneurial achieve-ment, the relationship is not well understood and,given the growing public policy emphasis whichaims to stimulate entrepreneurship through formaleducation, there is a need for a greater understand-ing of how entrepreneurial capabilities are devel-oped through life and work. The primary researchmethod is through life story interviews with peoplewho have demonstrated entrepreneurial attainmentin running business ventures. In-depth interviewsexplored their stories of the learning they experi-enced during their careers and business ventures.From the interpretation and analysis of these narra-tives, a number of significant themes emerge whichsuggest how the respondents made sense of theirexperiences and developed their entrepreneurialcapabilities. From these themes, a conceptual modelwhich relates the development of entrepreneuriallearning to entrepreneurial achievement is pro-posed.

MANAGERIAL AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS. Entrepreneurship can be understood as a process

of identifying opportunities for creating orreleasing value, and of forming ventures whichbring together resources to exploit those oppor-tunities.

. There is a close relationship between learningand entrepreneurial achievement in whichlearning is the dynamic process which enablesentrepreneurial behaviour to be enacted. Entre-preneurial learning is concerned with how

people construct new meaning in the process ofrecognising and acting on opportunities, and oforganising and managing ventures.

. Enterprise education has been widely researchedbut there is a need for the study of how peoplelearn to work successfully in entrepreneurialways in the lifeworld of the business and themarket. Interpretive methods such as life storyresearch appear to have the potential to providesuch understanding.

. Narrative research suggests that people struc-ture their accounts of entrepreneurial learningthrough a series of five broad ‘life stages’, con-sisting of early life, early career, engaging andentering a venture, growing a venture, movingout and on from a venture.

. A conceptual understanding of entrepreneuriallearning can be based on the relationshipbetween the two related clusters of achievingand learning which are connected by the themeof confidence and self-belief.

. The development and organisation of personaltheory appears highly significant in entrepre-neurial learning, but has not been explored pre-viously and merits further research;understanding personal theory and using it toachieve results seem to be closely connected andmay offer important insights into superior per-formance.

KEY WORDS

Entrepreneurship, learning, discourse, social con-struction, life story

INTRODUCTIONThe question of ‘how people become entrepre-neurs’ is long standing and unresolved. This articleexplores the role of learning in entrepreneurial

# 2001 Henry Stewart Publications, ISSN 1462–6004, 150–158

Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, Volume 8, Number 2

development and seeks to generate new insightsthrough the use of life story research. By studyingthe processes through which practising entrepre-neurs have developed their attitudes, behavioursand ways of working, we argue that it is possibleto understand better the ways in which individualslearn to act entrepreneurially. The subjectiveexperience of entrepreneurs, as recounted in theirown words through their life stories, has a funda-mental role in enabling us to explore their learningprocesses. Through this medium, the discursiveframing (Watson and Harris, 1999) of entrepreneur-ial thinking and acting becomes apparent. Thisresearch has the potential to make important con-tributions to understanding the entrepreneurialprocess, to theory and to the design of learningexperiences.Previous research has aimed to define entrepre-

neurial personality (Timmons et al., 1985) and toanalyse entrepreneurial career development andthe significance of factors such as self-efficacy(Bird, 1988). There has also been extensiveresearch into entrepreneurship education (Garavanand O’Cinneide, 1994; Gibb, 1993), while study ofcognitive approaches to entrepreneurial learninghas suggested the significance of expert knowledgeand use of memory (Young and Sexton, 1997).None of these approaches, however, has yet pro-vided an understanding of the nature of entrepre-neurial learning which is capable of boththeoretical and practical application. One reasonmay be the entitative preoccupation in much ofthe existing literature, already criticised elsewhere(Gray,1998; Steyaert and Bouwen,1997), in whichemphasis is placed on non-personal factors. Thisconcern with the significance of specific factors,however, has so far impeded a fuller understand-ing of the nature of entrepreneurial experience; theentrepreneur’s own story is rarely heard, and thereis a need ‘to enable voices to be heard that areusually silent’ (Plummer, 1983).There is an acknowledged need for work of an

interpretative and processual nature to exploreentrepreneurial development (Deakins, 1996).Little work of this nature has so far been pub-lished, and the adoption in the entrepreneurshipfield of interpretative methods such as discourseanalysis, which are accepted in social scienceresearch and which may yield new perspectives,has been slow (Potter and Weatherall, 1987),although discussions with other researchers indi-cate a growing use of these approaches in as yetunpublished research.

This research suggests that there is a close rela-tionship between learning and entrepreneurialachievement, but that the associated learning pro-cesses are not yet understood. Public policy withinthe UK and Europe aims to stimulate entrepre-neurship through education (Gavron et al., 1998;DTI, 1998). This assumes that educational estab-lishments such as universities can facilitate thedevelopment of entrepreneurial capabilities,although the OECD Jobs Strategy observed that:

‘Many of the behaviours associated with entre-preneurship can be taught. Others may bedifficult to emulate. The key consideration isthat entrepreneurship is scarce. Even if elementsof entrepreneurial behaviour can be taught, noteveryone will learn with the same proficiency.’(OECD, 1998)

This view is clearly sceptical about the efficacy ofeducation in enhancing entrepreneurial achieve-ment. While enterprise education has been widelyresearched, this has tended to focus on educationalpractices and programmes which cannot beassumed to prepare people for successful entrepre-neurial performance (Garavan and O’Cinneide,1994; Gorman et al., 1997). The consensus so far isthat entrepreneurship is learned primarily byexperience and discovery (Gibb, 1987; Deakinsand Freel, 1998). A practitioner-based perspectivewhich goes beyond what is known to work informal education and which explores how peoplelearn to work successfully in entrepreneurial waysin the lifeworld of the business and the market isrequired. In turn, this may contribute to thedesign of educational programmes.

DEFINING ENTREPRENEURSHIP ANDLEARNINGThe lack of generally accepted theoretical under-standings of entrepreneurship or of learning madethe conceptual framing of this research proble-matic. It is therefore necessary to explain the posi-tions used.The meaning of the term ‘entrepreneur’ has

evolved in the course of economic history, withmany authors offering definitions (Hebert andLink, 1988). If the emphasis is on the processualstudy of entrepreneurship rather than the entrepre-neur as an entity, entrepreneurship can be under-stood as dynamic rather than static, as beingfocused on opportunity seeking, and to be about ven-turing to synergise resources. From this thinking,

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the conceptual understanding of entrepreneurshipwhich this research uses is: ‘the process of identify-ing opportunities for creating or releasing value,and of forming ventures which bring togetherresources to exploit those opportunities’.

We suggest the role of learning to be how thecapabilities which are used to recognise and act onopportunities are developed. Learning is thedynamic process which enables entrepreneurialbehaviour to be enacted, as was acknowledged byboth Schumpeter (1934) and Kirzner (1973), whorecognised the intuitive and opportunity-focusednature of entrepreneurial learning.

There are diverse theories about the nature oflearning, however. Cognitivism emphasises theacquisition and retention of knowledge offeringlimited insights into ‘real-world’ activity (Gagne,1977), while Bandura’s theory of social cognition(1986) considered learning as ‘largely an informa-tion-processing activity’. From a cognitive per-spective, Young and Sexton (1997) emphasised therole of memory in defining effective entrepreneur-ial learning as a problem-solving process centredon ‘the acquisition, storage and use of entrepre-neurial knowledge in long-term memory’.

Given the limitations of cognitive theories inexplaining action, experiential learning has pro-posed conceptual models which have been influen-tial in suggesting how people learn fromexperience. Kolb (1984) defined learning as ‘a pro-cess whereby concepts are derived from and con-tinuously modified by experience’. Honey andMumford (1992) developed experiential learningfurther in learning styles theory, proposing fourbehavioural learning modes: activism, reflection,theorising and pragmatism. Mumford (1995) sug-gested that learning could be reactive or deliberate,and responsive or proactive, based on the level ofconscious intent, and usefully confirmed thatlearning is both the process by which knowledge,skills and insight are developed as well as the endresult of the content which is learned.

The notion of experiential learning is helpful inentrepreneurship, Deakins and Freel (1998) arguedthat ‘the entrepreneur is forced to alter behaviourthrough experiential learning’. Experience cangenerate new meaning, and bring about conse-quent change in thinking and behaviour, butpeople do not inevitably learn from or changetheir behaviour from experience. Learning istherefore a more complex process than is sug-gested by the single and double loop models pro-posed by experientialists (eg Argyris, 1982).

The action learning approach developed byRevans (1980) applied learning to solve practicalproblems for which there were no ‘textbook’answers by using a five-stage inquiry process andby stimulating ‘questioning insight’ through thestructuring of experience within an action learninggroup. This widely used method helps to demon-strate three important principles in learning:

— The opportunity or challenge presented byreal-life problems stimulates purposive learn-ing.

— Learning is a social as well as individual pro-cess.

— New learning generates ideas, possibilities andtheories from existing knowledge.

Given these different understandings, learning canbe seen as a cognitive process of acquiring and struc-turing knowledge, of making meaning from experi-ence, and of generating new solutions from existingknowledge. All these are relevant to the entrepre-neurial experience, yet none seems to offer a meansof completely understanding how entrepreneurialcapability is developed. The question of ‘what dopeople need to be able to do?’ is significant, and con-siderable effort has been invested in defining thecompetences of entrepreneurs and small businessowners. The Small Firms Standards (Small FirmsLead Body, 1997), the small firms competencemodel (Jacobs and Pons, 1993) and Deakins andFreel (1998) have used different methodologies toidentify different groups of entrepreneurial com-petences which, while they share some commonelements, have not achieved consensus in specifyingthe functional competences required for success.Conversely, there is a growing acceptance in

management learning from a social constructionistperspective that learning is an implicit and emer-gent sensemaking activity in which individualsconstruct meaning from their experiences and per-ceptions through their talk (Bruner, 1990; Weick,1995). The notion of ‘emergence’ can help us toexplore how people learn continually throughchanging, doing, experimenting and redefiningtheir sense of how they work in a whole-life pro-cess of development: as they evolve and reshapetheir identity, and their sense of what they do andwhere they are going (Gergen, 1994; Shotter,1993; Watson and Harris, 1999).It is also argued that much learning is ‘implicit’,

being hard to verbalise, occurring incidentally,and drawing on intuition and ‘tacit’ skills (Marsick

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152 Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development

and Watkins, 1990). Such learning may be hard toverbalise, yet could be highly significant in thearea of entrepreneurial learning in which experi-menting, discovery and intuition seem to takeplace (Gibb, 1987). In understanding learning, weneed to focus on the difference it creates. Mum-ford (1995) proposes that learning happens:

‘When people can demonstrate that they knowsomething that they didn’t know before(insights and realisations as well as facts) and/orwhen they can do something they couldn’t dobefore (skills).’

Learning can therefore be understood as the abilityto act differently comprising the three dimensionsof knowing, doing and understanding. It involves achange which causes or enables the individual todo things differently. People may ‘know’ cogni-tively, but if their actions do not change they havenot ‘learned’. Learning is a discursive, sensemakingprocess in which people create new reality, bytalking and doing, as they learn. Entrepreneuriallearning is therefore concerned with how peopleconstruct new meaning in the process of recognis-ing and acting on opportunities, and of organisingand managing ventures. It is much more thanacquiring the functional ‘knowing’, for it involvesactive ‘doing’ as well as understanding ‘what it isthat works’ and realising that one ‘can do it’;therefore, knowing, acting and making sense areinterconnected.

THE RESEARCH METHODOLOGYThe methodology was informed by a social con-structionist perspective (Bruner, 1990; Gergen,1994). Given the understanding of learning as asensemaking process, this led to the use of a narra-tive approach with the participants’ own life stor-ies providing the means by which the process andoutcomes of learning are expressed, as narrative is‘the form of hermeneutic expression in whichhuman action is understood and made meaningful’(Polkinghorne, 1988).The life story approach has grown in practice

and acceptance in recent years, being adopted inentrepreneurship research by Mitchell (1997) andSteyaert and Bouwen (1997), who reported posi-tive insights from using life stories and recom-mended wider adoption of the method. GibbDyer (1994) suggested the approach could provide‘a deeper understanding of what it is like to be anentrepreneur’.

Shotter (1993) described the development of‘knowledge in practice’ as a discursive process, andof ‘practical theory’ as a set of analytic tools whichenable people to see connections between aspectsof their lives and to use in accounting for theiractions. The meanings and conclusions whichemerge from people’s talk constitute their discursivelearning, a personal repertoire which gives the nar-rative coherence and plausibility, by conceptualis-ing what the narrator experienced, learned and cantalk about.Within the overall question of ‘how do people

learn to be entrepreneurial?’, the research aimed toexplore the processes through which peoplelearned to work entrepreneurially; and how theymade sense of their experiences. By comparingand analysing the accounts of different people, aconceptual model of learning might then be devel-oped. The research method was to conduct lifestory interviews with people who could beregarded as ‘exceptional performers’, havingachieved significant success in starting and grow-ing new business ventures, or from transformingexisting firms. Considerable care went into theselection, which was aided by professional inter-mediaries in business valuation who knew andrecommended individuals who met these criteriafor their inclusion:

— To have started a new business and achievedsubstantial growth (eg to £2m turnoverwithin 5 years); or

— To have acquired an existing business and haveimproved its performance and value substan-tially (eg from loss-making to profitability);and

— To have a majority or significant equity stakein the business.

Thirteen people were interviewed. Their businessventures were diverse and included computer ser-vices, tool hire, human resources, education, retail,food production and engineering, while their indi-vidual backgrounds included law, sales, chemistry,personnel management and catering. Each respon-dent participated in an in-depth interview ofaround two hours in which they ‘told their story’from childhood to the present, describing theirlearning experiences as their careers and businessventures developed.The interview was semi-structured with ques-

tions being developed in advance as ‘prompts’covering goal-setting, motivation, significant

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learning experiences, what was learned from theseand how this was applied. These questions wereused by the researcher to steer the interview. Atimeline was constructed during the interview,indicating significant life events and experiences,and this was used to prompt the respondent torevisit and explore these events and themes inmore depth.

Analysis of the interviews

Each interview was audio-taped and transcribedfor verification by the respondent. The transcriptswere then interpreted by means of discourse analy-sis (Denzin, 1989; Potter and Weatherall, 1987).The tellers tended to structure their stories aroundsignificant episodes in their lives in which theyrecalled that change or learning had taken place.They disclosed through their talk about these epi-sodes how they made sense of their experiences,what and how they learned, and changes in think-ing and action which they attributed. Each storywas analysed by both researchers to reveal the epi-sodes and meanings people had developed withinit. This information was compared across the stor-ies, and similarities and patterns were then identi-fied through coding and clustering.

FINDINGS FROM INTERPRETING THENARRATIVESThe life story approach has been of considerablevalue in understanding and interpreting the experi-ence and sensemaking of individuals. A number ofthemes emerged from analysis of the life storieswhich relate to the process of entrepreneurialdevelopment and together build towards a concep-tual model of entrepreneurial learning.

Life stages

A series of five broad ‘life stages’ emerged as ageneral structure within the narratives:

. Formative experience— Early life — family background, education,

adolescence— Early career — first jobs, vocational or pro-

fessional learning. The entrepreneurial process

— Engaging and entering a venture — selecting,starting, acquiring, joining

— Growing a venture — taking control, driv-ing, leading, developing people

— Moving out and on from a venture — selling,leaving, finding new opportunities.

The latter three stages characterised the indivi-duals’ involvement with each business. Four of therespondents had gone through all three of thesephases at least once and had established an entre-preneurial career of entering, transforming andleaving businesses in which these three phases werebeing repeated several times. Two of them hadgrown their ‘prime’ business over a period ofmore than 20 years and had moved on to becomeactive non-executives of several smaller businesses.Nine respondents were in the process of growingtheir first ‘prime’ business.

Building a conceptual model

From analysing, interpreting and comparing thenarratives, a number of themes recurred andseemed to be significant in shaping the respon-dents’ experiences. This research has therefore gen-erated fresh insights to inform modification andrefinement of an initial model of entrepreneuriallearning (Rae, 1999), clarifying the relationshipsbetween the themes it proposed. The revisedmodel is shown in Figure 1.Extracts from one account are used here to

show how the personal narrative weaves togethersome of the different themes within the entrepre-neurial learning model. Robert’s story is one ofdeveloping his career in the food industry bymoving between corporate and independent busi-nesses in a series of management roles, beforeeventually becoming managing director of a man-agement buy-out. In each extract from his story,more than one theme from the model becomesexplicit in his talk.

Achieving

In this extract, Robert talks about his goal ofbecoming a managing director and relates this tohis need for challenges. The themes of intentional-ity and of believing in one’s ability to achieve theend result by focusing on what needs to be donerecur in his story:

‘I worked out that I wanted to be a fully-fledged Managing Director and I started outlooking to develop my career down that track. Iended up going to a privately owned company,working for the owner and went in there withthe title of General Manager. I didn’t look at thethings that would stop me from doing it, I justlooked at the end result and said ‘‘Well whathave I got to do to get there?’’. So it’s a way ofthinking, it’s a positive thought process. I think



you just have to have challenges, not just withwork but with your personal life as well.’

Setting and achieving ambitious goals

Setting and achieving ambitious goals were influ-ential in each person’s learning, as with Robert’saspiration of becoming a managing director. Allthe respondents were achievement oriented, highlymotivated and determined, with great clarityabout what was important to them and why, thesevalues having been formed in early life. The roleof personal motivation and goal-setting appearedto be highly significant, as explored by McLelland(1961).

Personal values and motivation

As Robert described his ‘positive thought process’,people talked of their values and motivation as acoherent personal philosophy within which goal-oriented behaviour was a compelling and necessarydiscipline. Other characteristics which emergedstrongly included their need for constant chal-lenge, being opportunistic, the ability to displaysharpness of thought and to take sound decisions,

and the drive to have ownership. The respondentsalso recognised the value and importance of otherpeople.

Learning

Robert recounts how he learned from the ‘des-potic’ owner of a business. It suggests that personalrelationships are powerful influences in learning ifdiffering styles can be overcome, and that businesspractices and skills are learned from other practi-tioners by working with them:

‘I hated his management style because it wasagainst everything inherent in me and it wasalien to anything I’d ever experienced before,but I just kind of ignored it and got on with thejob and got underneath his skin a bit, and gotvery close to him. The things he taught mewere, on the commercial front, that everyFriday night, before you go home you countthe cash, and nobody had really taught meabout cash before in business. Here was a guywho was passionate about cash and I learnt a lotabout cash. I also learnt from him that youdon’t believe everything everybody tells you.

Relationships

Personaltheory Confidence and

self-belief

Known capabilities

Achieving ambitious goals

Active learning

DEVELOPMENT OF ENTREPRENEURIAL CAPABILITY

Achieving

Learning

Values andmotivation

Figure 1: A conceptual model of entrepreneurial learning

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He questioned the detail of everything and thattaught me that you don’t take everything thateverybody tells you at face value — question it.’

Relationships

All the respondents cited examples of how theyhad learned skills and insights from others, includ-ing parents, business owners and managers,employees and non-executive directors, especiallyearly in their careers. Clearly, social relationshipsare fundamental in learning the living theory andbusiness practice of entrepreneurship from otherpeople. The life stories enable entrepreneurship tobe understood as a continuing process of indivi-duals learning from their own and others’ experi-ences, as well as enabling others to adapt and learnfrom them. The senior entrepreneurs who hadbecome non-executive directors were now playinga mentoring role, passing on their learning to helpyounger entrepreneurs to learn and to grow theirbusinesses.

Known capabilities

In the earlier parts of their careers, people devel-oped skills and knowledge in which they becameconfident and around which they structured theircareers. The capabilities Robert developed as ayoung manager, for example, are ones he contin-ued to use in his managerial career. Such capabil-ities are varied, often functional or expert innature depending on individual roles, includingselling, personnel development, and transformingbusiness performance. They had generally beenacquired by our respondents by their mid- to late-20s, but as they became aware and confident ofthese capabilities, they also appreciated their lim-itations and weaknesses in relation to running abusiness and developed a greater acceptance thatthey needed to work with other people with com-plementary skills.

Personal theory

Personal theory relates to how the meaningsderived from learning episodes are organised andenacted by individuals as they work to achievedesired results. People gain practical ‘knowing-in-action’ through experience and construct this dis-cursively in making sense of what they do. Itemerged strongly from the interviews that, astheir careers developed, each person was formingsuch theories, which they often described as ‘whatworks for me is’. For example, for Robert, such

insights as ‘you count the cash’ and ‘you don’ttake everything for granted’ became personal the-ories which informed his management practiceand which recur in his story. The test of these the-ories was pragmatic: they were valid and effectivefor that person in accomplishing goals in the con-texts in which they had been tried. These personaltheories can be grouped into four main areas:

— vision, decision-making and planning;— growing the business by being close to the

market;— balancing between control and ‘letting go’;— managing through people.

It seems that the development and organisation ofpersonal theory is highly significant in learning,but it is not a concept which has been exploredother than by Shotter (1993). Understanding one’spersonal theory and using it to achieve resultsseem to be closely connected and may offerimportant insights into superior performance. Theway in which personal theory is developed by theindividual, yet forms part of a wider ‘entrepre-neurial discourse’ of culturally available livingtheory suggests that its role in a social learningprocess is highly significant.This extract shows how Robert combines dif-

ferent insights he has learned to construct his per-sonal theory of the need to develop people:

‘One of the most important things for a MD toachieve is to develop his people; it’s about nevertaking anything at face value, coupled with thelesson that says that you can only achieve ifyou’ve got the right people. You’ve got to havethe right people in your organisation, you can’ttolerate weak links so you change the person,get the person in place and then you build thatperson up.’

Active learning

All the respondents expressed through their storiesdescriptions of how they had learned actively;speed of active learning seemed to be an essentialdimension. They valued learning and learned frommany sources, including direct experience of fail-ure or success and experimenting. Beyond personalexperience, sources such as books and case studieswere used, together with social networking. Theability to learn and use what is learned are clearlyessential in developing entrepreneurial capability.This final extract shows how in his talk Robert



uses doing, experimenting and failing as a routinelearning process:

‘You might have 50 failures and try it a differentway and let them know that failures happen onthe route, you just fail on that and just do it adifferent way. I mean I fail all the time, I dothings wrong all the time but you just say ‘‘I’vedone that wrong, do it this way’’ and you reactand do it right.’

This suggests that confidence is needed to learnfrom failure, in that Robert learned and changedhis approach, but did not accept failure as person-ally negative or destructive.

Confidence and self-belief

A high level of self-confidence was central in thestories of those interviewed, and individuals con-nected their need to achieve ambitious goals totheir belief that they would accomplish what theyset out to. There was a very high level of self-belief and self-efficacy (Bird, 1988; Boyd andVozikis, 1994). The motivation to achieve andconsequent goal setting seemed to stimulate learn-ing. Through achieving, their self-confidencegrew as people learned what they could achieve.The learning might be deliberate or incidental butwas largely instrumental, in that individualslearned in order to achieve as well as from theirachieving, and put what they learned to use. Whatemerged was a recognition by the respondents ofthe value of learning in relation to achievement.The theme of confidence and self-belief is there-fore the central notion in the model which con-nects entrepreneurial achieving and learning.Without self-belief, learning is unlikely to result inachievement.

CONCLUSIONSThere are three conclusions to put forward fromthis research so far.First, the life story approach has enabled the

researchers to gain a deep personal and contextualunderstanding of the nature of entrepreneurialexperience. Combined with the use of advancedmethods of interpretation and analysis, it is a valu-able method which makes the sensemaking andlearning processes available through discourse.Secondly, the entrepreneurial learning model is

significant because the themes identified throughnarrative highlight the integrated and interdepen-dent nature of the learning process, rather than

emphasising the importance of one particularaspect such as memory. Each of the themes is sig-nificant although not necessarily new or wellexplored; it is the dynamic interrelationshipsbetween them which contribute to our under-standing of entrepreneurial behaviour. In this way,the model advances theory because it moves onfrom saying that entrepreneurial learning simplyoccurs ‘through experience’. Discourse shows howpeople make sense of their experience. The role ofpersonal theory in particular has not been identi-fied previously in entrepreneurship literature; wesuggest it is of central importance and a vital areafor further research.Finally, the relationship between learning and

achievement is significant. While achievement,intentionality and self-efficacy have been exten-sively researched, they have not been connectedwith learning in the literature. Our research sug-gests learning to achieve and learning fromachievement are vital in the process of entrepre-neurial formation. These conclusions have impor-tant implications for entrepreneurial practice, foreducation and for policy.

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David Rae is Director of Enterprise Development

of the Derbyshire Business School at the Univer-

sity of Derby and is responsible for entrepreneur-

ial management and business development

programmes.

Mary Carswell is Professor, Dean and Director of

The Derbyshire Business School at The University

of Derby.

