Linking Business Games to Business and Entrepreneurship Education: Insights from a Bibliometric and Literature Review

Business games seem like a sustainable solution to business and entrepreneurship education. Still, knowledge on the topic is so dispersed that educators lack a clear understanding of the conceptual path linking business games to business and entrepreneurship education. This article proposed to synthesize academic literature on business games. It analyzes bibliographic data from 733 documents from the Web of Science core collection published over the past 65 years. The results provide rich content on the main knowledge clusters in business game research, the key concepts driving each cluster, the relationships between them, emerging trends, and the seminal papers business scholars and practitioners could use to deepen their knowledge of each cluster. The results also led to a conceptual framework describing current research on business games in entrepreneurship education, identifying key research gaps, and proposing a research agenda that could help scholars make meaningful contributions to the entrepreneurship niche in business games research. Specifically, technology acceptance and experiential learning literature have laid the theoretical foundations for understanding the role of business games in business and entrepreneurial education. Research has mainly focused on higher-education students' entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial self-efficacy as outcomes.