Transfer of entrepreneurship education best practices from business schools to engineering and technology institutions: evidence from Pakistan

This paper examines the transfer of entrepreneurship education best practices from business schools to engineering and technology institutions. Nations like Pakistan need to educate their youth enrolled in large numbers in engineering and technology disciplines, to unleash their entrepreneurial potential to address the challenge of unemployment and hence economic development. Like rest of the world most entrepreneurship education programs in the country are generally offered by business and management schools. The article provides a cost effective approach of transferring the entrepreneurship education best practices developed at the Institute of Business Administration Karachi to five regional engineering and technology institutions. This paper employs the knowledge-transfer theoretical lens using the action research methodology to understand the application of various interventions to transfer entrepreneurship education practices. The results show that the success of these transfer efforts depends on several factors, including quality of the program, quality of the transfer team, absorptive capacity of the receiver and various contextual and motivational factors. Other developing countries with similar challenges can also benefit from the model.