Involving the entrepreneurial role model: A possible development for entrepreneurship education

This paper offers and discusses an alternative way to delivering entrepreneurship education to students in higher education institutions through the involvement of a role model(s) in entrepreneurship teaching and learning. A previous study with students in an Indonesian university showed that the role model is in position to give positive influence to their entrepreneurial motivation, and furthermore, the choice for a future career as an entrepreneur. As a further development, this paper outlines a model whereby the appropriate role of the dominant entrepreneurial role models (who are parents, entrepreneurs and teachers/lecturers) are integrated one with the other and can be used as a source of an entrepreneurial learning process. The lecturer can take on the major task as the facilitator to encourage students to seek the appropriate knowledge about entrepreneurship in this integration whilst the other two constructs can take on their major tasks to act as sources of informal entrepreneurial learning (through social and active learning). Entrepreneurs in particular, can act as a 'business father or mother' to whom students can talk and with whom they can establish a longer infonnal relationship. This paper argues that whilst this model can be implemented successfully it is critical that a suitable and proper institutional setting -in terms of curriculum arrangement -alongside the availability of supporting facilities and infrastructures be arranged and addressed to support it. © 2014 by Jordan Whitney Enterprises, Inc, USA