Undergraduate entrepreneurship education programs have been growing at a fast pace in response to demands from both students and policy makers. Due to this rapid growth, there is no consensus on the core competencies entrepreneurship education should be teaching. This can lead to inconsistencies across programs, which makes it hard to understand the efficacy of entrepreneurship education both leading to venture creation and communicating the value of entrepreneurship degrees to external stakeholders. This lack of consensus makes it challenging to share best practices, develop signature pedagogies, and collaborate across institutions because institutions are building bespoke programs.

This study addresses this gap by synthesizing the existing literature that defines specific entrepreneurial competencies. This research examined over 20 different scholarly articles, with the goal to identify the central competencies consistent across multiple articles. The analysis identified 41 distinct competencies and provides a table defining these competencies and categorizing them into four core areas–business skills, interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills, and opportunity navigation skills. UCINet, a social network mapping software was utilized to visualize these concepts and to identify the competencies and papers that were most central to the literature. The most central competencies are: creativity, opportunity recognition, risk mitigation, self-efficacy, value creation, learning through experience, and perseverance. 

This research contributes to the literature by providing a clear categorization of entrepreneurial competencies and identifying those that are most central to the field. This framework would allow educators to more effectively collaborate and prioritize competencies to incorporate into their programs. It also could provide students with a tool to evaluate their own competency development and empower them to seek new opportunities to build skill, communicate the value of their degree to potential employers and partners, and transfer their learning to their professional work, whether in their own company or in a traditional work setting.