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Facing the multiplication of entrepreneurship education programmes (EEP) and the increasing resources allocated, there is a need to develop a common framework to evaluate the design of those programmes. The purpose of this article is to propose such a framework, based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB).

TPB is a relevant tool to model the development of entrepreneurial intention through pedagogical processes. The independent variables are the characteristics of the EEP and the dependent variables are the antecedents of entrepreneurial behaviour. To illustrate and test the relevance of the evaluation methodology, a pilot study is conducted.

Data are consistent and reliable, considering the small scale of this experiment. The EEP assessed had a strong measurable impact on the entrepreneurial intention of the students, while it had a positive, but not very significant, impact on their perceived behavioural control.

This is a first step of an ambitious research programme aiming at producing theory‐grounded knowledge. Reproduction of the experiment will allow researchers to test how specific characteristics of an EEP influence its impact and how the impact differs across several cohorts of students. Those comparisons will serve to improve a priori the design of EEP.

The new methodology is built on a robust theoretical framework and based on validated measurement tools. Its originality is about a relative – longitudinal – measure of impact over time and a particular use of the theory of planned behaviour which is seen as an assessment framework.

The aim of this article is to offer a conceptual framework in entrepreneurship education largely inspired by education sciences and discuss its two main levels, the ontological and educational levels. This framework is then used to discuss various types of entrepreneurship teaching programs, focusing on three broad categories of learning processes.

This article uses intensive reviews of literature in the fields of education and entrepreneurship. The teaching framework and the derived propositions are intended to provide a bridge between education sciences and the field of entrepreneurship and seeks to stress the scientific legitimacy of entrepreneurship education.

Finds that there is a need to reconsider entrepreneurship education in its wide diversity, both from an ontological and pedagogical point‐of‐view. The range of theoretical choices, objectives, publics, pedagogical methods and institutional context should be approached through the lenses of multiple teaching models and learning processes, which can be structured around a general framework.

The framework allows for the combination of both the concept of teaching models and learning process in a general theory‐driven framework and their applicability to specific entrepreneurship education situations.

The authors' contribution sheds a new light, both on the design and on the implementation of entrepreneurship teaching programs. An explicit conceptual framework should help the effective and systematic design, management and evaluation of new or existing programs, along all the relevant dimensions.

The authors propose a conceptual framework, a canonic teaching model, in entrepreneurship education.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the heterogeneity of the initial growth trajectories adopted by young firms, using an approach similar to Delmar et al.'s analysis, in order to better understand and describe the underlying development patterns.

The authors analyze the development during their initial years of existence of the population of all firms in Belgium which are more than three years old and have grown above micro‐firm size between 1992 and 2002 (n=2,152). The authors measure the evolution over time of three basic economic data (number of employees, sales and assets) and seven financial data (value added, operating income, current income, net income, cash flow, working capital and shareholders' equity).

A taxonomy was identified defined around four stable typical growth trajectories. These trajectories were adopted by a majority of firms in the sample and were not related to firm size or industry affiliation.

The paper's findings confirm, using an original empirical approach, previous results related to early growth and highlight the oversimplification of the life‐cycle approaches often used by practitioners and policy makers. They also open interesting research avenues regarding the endogenous and exogenous factors explaining the adoption of a given trajectory by a firm as well as why the trajectories identified are relatively stable over time.