The role of entrepreneurship education and start-up experience for handling communication and liability of newness

Purpose
– The aim of this study is to test the assumption that ability to handle communication and liability of newness (LoN) is enhanced by academic entrepreneurship education and/or previous start‐up experience.

Design/methodology/approach
– The data collection includes a questionnaire with a total sample of 392 responding entrepreneurs in Sweden. Statistical analyses are made between entrepreneurs with academic entrepreneurship education respectively previous start‐up experience.

Findings
– The findings show that entrepreneurs with experience from entrepreneurship education report more developed communicative skills in the dimensions of openness as well as adaptation, whereas the dimension of other‐orientation is found to be learned by previous start‐up experience. When it comes to perceived problems related to LoN the differences between the groups were not as strong as assumed. However, the differences observed imply that also for handling LoN the authors identify a combined effect of possessing start‐up experience as well as experience from entrepreneurship education. Consequently, entrepreneurs with experience from both, show in total the most elaborated skills.

Practical implications
– One way to improve future entrepreneurship educations is to make students more aware of the mutual profit in a business agreement and how to communicate this in a marketing situation. Another suggestion is to include starting business as a course work.

Originality/value
– This study not only meets the call for actual outcome from entrepreneurship educations in terms of changed behaviour but also for interdisciplinary research in the entrepreneurship field in integrating leadership research with focus on communication.