Towards a Learning Philosophy Based on Experience in Entrepreneurship Education

If experience is the guiding light in entrepreneurship education, then where is the philosophy of experience? This article illuminates the philosophical foundations of entrepreneurship education by discussing learning through experience. We introduce a diagram that addresses primary and secondary experiences and their interplay as well as a model that further reveals how educative entrepreneurial experience can be researched through empirical phenomenology. We suggest that although entrepreneurship is currently positioned as an experiential subject in academia, the theoretical and philosophical roots of experience in learning have not been fully addressed, leading to a deficit in our understanding of how knowledge is derived from experience, and how experience may differ depending on its philosophical underpinnings.