Assessment of Innovative Entrepreneurship Education in Nigerian Tertiary Institutions

Abstract

The aim of this research was to assess entrepreneurship education which is a relatively new phenomenon in Nigerian higher education institutions. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit the participants of the focus groups and the interviews. Research studies were also selected to demonstrate how diffusion of innovations theory provides a useful framework for understanding how change occurs within education domain. The study population includes lecturers and students of National College of Education, Polytechnics, and Universities clustered as higher institutions in Nigeria. Students and the lecturers were used in the study because the students are the direct beneficiary of entrepreneurship education and the lecturers are the direct facilitators of the entrepreneurship in Nigeria. Thematic analysis was adopted for the study and deductive coding technique was employed to extract utterances of the transcribed interviews. The findings indicated that those criteria employed in assessing entrepreneurship education which includes compatibility, complexity, observability, trialability, relative advantage and training are its driver in tertiary institutions in Nigeria and informs the academic community in Nigeria of the advancement of entrepreneurship education. It also reveals the importance of entrepreneurship education as a potential strategy to battle unemployment and serve as a tool for social, economy and societal development. The study proposes some managerial implications for all the entrepreneurship education stakeholders and offers suggestions for the future studies.