Principal Topic

Entrepreneurship education in Japan is beginning to be actively implemented, but there is none in real terms being implemented for the young. The reason for this is that after university graduation, most students who aim for entrance to top-level secondary schools and universities and channel their energies into preparing for university entrance exams through high school pursue employment at major corporations. In Japan there is a textbook standardization system created by the Ministry of Education, and thus implementing entrepreneurship education, either within standard courses or as an extracurricular activity, would pose great difficulties. Also, there is a pronounced feeling that instructors themselves would argue that the purpose of public education is not to encourage people to start businesses. Entrepreneurship education in universities is geared toward mastery of academic knowledge of business administration, but there is some question about whether this is already too late a stage in students’ lives for it to serve as education that actually prepares them to be entrepreneurs. We therefore studied a group of university students, surveying them about their perceptions with respect to entrepreneurs to see how best to encourage the greatest number in the direction of entrepreneurship.

Method

Interviews with 300 students were conducted at four universities in metropolitan Tokyo from June through August, 1999.  The survey included questions about when students had first encountered information about entrepreneurship and through what media they had learned more about it. Students who stated that they wanted to start their own businesses were asked why and when they planned to do so; students who stated that they did not want to start their own businesses were also asked why. We had each respondent conduct a personality self-assessment using Egogram.

Implications

Our study indicates that the lower the age at which students are exposed to entrepreneurship education, the more likely it is to foster entrepreneurship. Also, entrepreneurial education itself should be implemented in such a way as to place emphasis not on mastery of business knowledge in the academic sense, but on fostering students’ inner resources. The proportions of respondents who first encountered information related to entrepreneurship in junior high school or earlier and planned to start their own businesses was 38% ; for those who first encountered such information in high school, 32% ; in college, 19%. The proportion of all respondents who planned to start their own businesses was 22.2%. In general the younger the age at which respondents had first encountered such information, the higher the proportion that planned to start their own businesses.