Collaboration in entrepreneurship education: challenges, opportunities and innovations

Abstract This introduction to the Special Issue sketches out some potential areas for collaboration and innovation in the various domains of entrepreneurship education and the entrepreneurial university. It introduces the articles included in the Special Issue and briefly describes how they provide valuable insights into the variety of forms of collaboration that are of relevance to entrepreneurship education in a range of contexts. The authors provide different perspectives on the challenges facing entrepreneurship education and HEIs, different forms of collaboration, and different opportunities for innovation that may arise as a result. The Special Issue includes international examples of such innovations in entrepreneurship education with a view to establishing fresh ideas and insights that may be of wider application within the education, entrepreneurship, HEI, and policy communities.

in which these might be developed? This Special Issue focuses on the value of collaboration in answering these questions.
The benefits of collaboration can be seen in response to the potential incongruence between the (stereotyped and increasingly misrepresented) ivory tower teaching of academics and the hard-won, real-world experience of entrepreneurs. A response to this dilemma is to suggest the importance of the latter entering the classroom (Kuratko, 2005) and the former engaging more closely with entrepreneurial practice (Higgins, Refai and Keita, this issue). Nonetheless, such approaches produce implications throughout the institution and beyond; they necessitate new partners, new ways of learning and modes of assessment (Fayolle, Verzat and Wapshott, 2016;Solomon, Duffy and Tarabishy, 2002) if we are to move beyond guest speakers on traditionally taught modules to thinking about how academics and entrepreneurs might collaborate in the design and delivery of programmes.
Collaboration can also involve the interactions between different disciplines (Janssen and Bacq, 2010;McCarver, Jessup and Davis, 2010) as well as with other stakeholders, organisations and funding bodies Pugh et al, 2016). The claimed centrality of entrepreneurship to the economy and society, tackling forms of disadvantage, engaging in social enterprise as well as more traditional profit-seeking ventures necessitates the broadening of entrepreneurship education beyond business schools (Duval-Couetil, 2013). This involves elements of entrepreneurship, and therefore potential collaboration, entering new areas of the academic curriculum. However, with this expansion into new disciplines and new forums comes attendant challenges in terms of issues of legitimacy, value and application that are likely to create significant challenges for future curriculum development (see e.g. Wyness and Jones, this issue).
Beyond the classroom and the formal curriculum, the development of entrepreneurship education has also suggested alternative ways of thinking about the roles of HEIs. This changing role is highlighted in several of the articles in this Special Issue in terms of the modern 'entrepreneurial university' as a response to HEIs' 'third mission' through collaboration with industry and government (Philpott, Dooley, O'Reilly and Lupton, 2011).
This reflects the increasingly complex interconnections and interdependencies between higher education, society and the economy (Jongbloed, Enders and Salerno, 2008). Culkin (2016), in a review of HEI activity supporting entrepreneurship, identifies how HEIs can be a focus of financial resources and government action that relates to activities extending beyond the walls of the institution. In this type of role, HEIs can also act as 'anchor institutions', embedded within and committed to particular regions and to regional development (Menzies, 2010;Nicolosi and Keeling, 2013). However, despite the potential for significant impacts, Pugh et al (2016) suggest that such broader roles for HEIs, and in turn alternative forms of collaboration, are under-researched.
There is also significant scope for international collaboration as a means of addressing shared challenges (see e.g. Bibikas, Vorley and Wapshott, 2017;Heitor, 2015) and for engaging in productive debates around approaches rooted in different contexts and responding to different objectives. This broadening scope of collaborators may also involve new ways of thinking about the provision of entrepreneurship education, for example involving the 'enterprise industry' which includes a broad range of often profit-seeking businesses providing forms of support, advice and advocacy services to entrepreneurs and small businesses (Mallett, forthcoming). Such organisations and the networks that can develop between and around them offer further potential ways to root entrepreneurship education in practice as well as to develop network building and valuable learning communities (Zhang and Hamilton, 2010).
This introduction has sketched out some potential areas for collaboration and innovation in the various domains of entrepreneurship education and the entrepreneurial university. The

The articles in this Special Issue
The first article in this Special Issue is 'Boundary crossing ahead: perspectives of entrepreneurship by sustainability educators in Higher Education' by Lynne Wyness and Paul Jones. Wyness and Jones adopt a communities of practice lens to explore collaborations across disciplines, in this case entrepreneurship and sustainability. In doing so, the study illuminates the delivery of entrepreneurship education outside the business school. In contrast to the urgency of the contribution and value entrepreneurship for organisation such as the OECD and amongst business and management students, amongst those delivering sustainability education, views were found to be more mixed. This has important implications for those who simply seek to copy and paste courses throughout the academic curriculum, highlighting the potential for powerful, problematic boundaries between the different communities of practice that might limit the extent of in-depth, productive collaboration. The authors also highlight the importance of ongoing learning across disciplines through collaborative practice. One way this can be achieved is through reframing our understanding of students as collaborators involved in the co-production of learning and knowledge creation. The authors argue that it is through collaborative forms of education that engage students in experiential learning that we can explore more deeply the implications of the student as