Abstract
The 21st International Entrepreneurship Forum (IEF) Conference, held at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, from 18 to 20 September 2025, focused on the theme
The report presents the conference as a platform for advancing understanding of how human and social capital are developed through formal, informal, and technology-enabled learning. It emphasises the role of education, innovation, and entrepreneurship in fostering value creation and societal wellbeing, particularly in the South African and wider African context. The conference themes also foregrounded emerging pedagogies, the growing significance of digital technologies including AI, and the importance of multidisciplinary approaches to entrepreneurial learning. In this sense, the event framed entrepreneurship education as both a developmental and ecosystemic concern, rather than a narrow instructional field.
The keynote addresses established much of the conference’s conceptual direction. Dr. Ruben Richards argued that entrepreneurship cannot flourish in dysfunctional municipal environments, making local state capability a precondition for business success. His keynote linked entrepreneurship directly to governance quality, infrastructure, and public services, stressing that entrepreneurial leadership must engage with institutional realities rather than operate apart from them. This intervention shifted the discussion from individualistic accounts of entrepreneurship toward a systemic understanding in which local governance and public administration shape entrepreneurial possibilities.
Prof. Zoltan Acs extended this ecosystem perspective through his keynote on “Ecosystems of Learning: The Urban Dividend.” He highlighted the intersection of education, cities, and policy in generating entrepreneurial opportunity and stressed the importance of appropriate data for understanding and projecting future ecosystem development. His preview of the VIGS-Digital Entrepreneurship Ecosystems Index, with a particular focus on Africa, reinforced the conference’s concern with evidence-led decision-making. In the report, this keynote is presented as an important call for more rigorous measurement and comparative understanding of digital entrepreneurial ecosystems, especially in contexts where policy and institutional support remain uneven.
The third keynote, delivered by South Africa’s Minister for Small Business Development, Stella Ndabeni, brought a strong policy and implementation focus. She criticised the inaccessibility of conventional finance for entrepreneurs and called for reform of funding mechanisms and regulations affecting MSMEs. Her address highlighted South Africa’s national strategy for entrepreneurship, the expansion of incubation centres, and stronger partnerships with higher education institutions. Importantly, her message framed entrepreneurship not only as business creation but as the development of mindsets, capabilities, and support structures that enable individuals to participate in changing markets. This keynote reinforced the report’s central claim that entrepreneurship education must be aligned with policy reform, access to finance, and institutional coordination.
The panel sessions developed these themes in greater depth. The first panel, on education, entrepreneurship, and economic and social development, concluded that education is foundational to both competitiveness and social cohesion. The report argues that when education is properly targeted, it enhances human capital, innovation, technological adoption, and social mobility. Entrepreneurship education, in turn, contributes to job creation and local development by enabling new ventures and strengthening SMEs. The panel therefore presented education and entrepreneurship as mutually reinforcing forces within broader development processes, capable of generating both economic and social value.
The second panel focused on policy formation for entrepreneurial learning. Here, entrepreneurial learning was defined in expansive terms, extending beyond business skills to include creativity, resilience, opportunity recognition, innovation, and problem-solving. The report stresses that policy should embed entrepreneurship education across all levels of formal and lifelong learning, while also encouraging collaboration between government, academia, private actors, and civil society. This section of the conference underscores that entrepreneurial learning must be treated as a policy domain in its own right, linked to youth employment, innovation, and national development goals.
The third panel addressed ecosystem value creation through education and entrepreneurship. It emphasised that entrepreneurial ecosystems are constituted by interdependent actors, institutions, resources, cultural norms, and support structures. According to the report, access to skills, mentoring, role models, networks, and finance is crucial for encouraging entrepreneurial uptake. At the same time, the panel acknowledged the structural weaknesses often found in Global South contexts, where ecosystems may be fragmented, weakly coordinated, or culturally unsupportive. The discussion therefore highlighted the need to reduce bottlenecks, improve access to education and finance, and create more coherent support systems so that learning can translate into entrepreneurial action.
A particularly important contribution came from the panel on transdisciplinary learning and entrepreneurship. This session argued that contemporary entrepreneurial challenges, including technological change, inequality, and climate pressures, cannot be addressed through single-discipline approaches. The report distinguishes transdisciplinarity from multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work by emphasising its deeper integration of academic, professional, and community-based knowledge systems. In entrepreneurial contexts, this enables more holistic forms of problem-solving that connect markets, technology, policy, culture, finance, and social dynamics. The report presents transdisciplinarity as especially valuable for entrepreneurship education, since it prepares learners to manage uncertainty, work across boundaries, and generate socially relevant innovation.
The fifth panel, on education, coaching, and learning for entrepreneurship, shifted attention to the learner’s identity, emotions, and lived context. A major theme here was that entrepreneurial development concerns not only what learners know, but who they are becoming. The panel highlighted the importance of culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy, emotional intelligence, values-led entrepreneurship, and coaching as a developmental practice. The “head–heart” model discussed in this session challenged conventional cognitive approaches by arguing that entrepreneurial learning must engage values, purpose, and emotional resilience. The report treats this as a significant contribution, suggesting that entrepreneurship education should evolve toward more holistic and human-centred pedagogies.
The special panel on the book Entrepreneurship Education: A South African Perspective on Supporting Small-Business Development further reinforced the developmental role of higher education. The discussion framed entrepreneurship education as a response to persistent graduate employability challenges and high youth unemployment in emerging economies. Of particular importance was the emphasis on experiential learning, especially learning through engagement with small business owners and supporting stakeholders rather than through abstract classroom exercises alone. The book project itself was presented as interdisciplinary, practice-oriented, and intended for multiple audiences including scholars, students, policymakers, and business owners.
The presentation sessions complemented the panel discussions by exploring psychological and sociological perspectives on entrepreneurial learning. The report notes that psychological approaches focused on cognition, resilience, motivation, self-efficacy, and the ways individuals process uncertainty and learn through reflection and action. Sociological approaches, by contrast, stressed social capital, networks, institutions, role models, and cultural context. Taken together, these perspectives support a dual understanding of entrepreneurial learning as both an internal developmental process and a relational, socially embedded one.
A notable feature of the presentation sessions was the attention given to methodological rigour. While the report acknowledges the value of systematic reviews and practice-based studies, it also records critical feedback on methodological mismatch, especially where evaluative claims were made without sufficient analytical depth. This methodological critique is important because it indicates that the conference was not only concerned with the substance of entrepreneurship education, but also with the quality of research used to inform it. The call for tighter alignment between research questions, methods, and context reflects a broader concern with producing more robust and policy-relevant knowledge in the field.
Overall, the conference report advances a coherent and pragmatic agenda for entrepreneurship education and ecosystem development. It argues that entrepreneurial ecosystems must be built on functioning local institutions, evidence-led policy, accessible finance, reduced regulatory barriers, and support structures that recognise both the technical and human dimensions of entrepreneurial learning. Equally, entrepreneurship education must move beyond narrow business training to include coaching, wellbeing, identity formation, cultural responsiveness, and transdisciplinary capability building. The report therefore positions entrepreneurship education as a strategic public good and a central mechanism for fostering inclusive, resilient, and opportunity-rich ecosystems.
In sum, the 21st IEF Conference presented entrepreneurship as a socially embedded, policy-relevant, and educationally complex process. Its main contribution lies in connecting ecosystem thinking with entrepreneurial learning and in showing that value creation depends not only on entrepreneurial individuals, but also on the quality of institutions, pedagogies, networks, and public policy surrounding them. The report suggests that future work in this field should continue to integrate evidence, place-based realities, and interdisciplinary perspectives so that entrepreneurship education can contribute meaningfully to sustainable economic and social development in emerging economies.