10 May, 2017

CIT and the Hincks Centre proudly hosted the 3e ECSB Entrepreneurship Education Conference on campus in May 2017. Conference Chair was Dr Breda Kenny, Head of Hincks Centre for Entrepreneurship Excellence. Over the three day event, approx. 120 delegates from Ireland, Europe, USA, Canada,  South Africa and Vietnam as well as the ECSB (European Council for Small Business & Entrepreneurship) board of directors and representatives from USASBE (US council for small business and Entrepreneurship)  gathered to debate and exchange their research and experiences of the major challenges and advances in entrepreneurship education. A total of 24 practitioner development workshops and 36 research papers were presented.

The award for best paper went to Dr Martin Lackéus, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden for his paper "Can Entrepreneurial Education Escape Being escape, being caught between marginal ('the Devil') and Irrelevant ('the deep blue see') practices". The best practitioner development workshop was awarded to Scott A. Johnson and Bastian Thomsen, The College of Idaho, USA for their workshop  “Making the Teaching and Practice of Social Entrepreneurship Come Alive for Students: Integrating Classroom and Field Experiences Through Enactus”.

Previous venues for the conference include Aarhus University, Denmark (3e 2013), University of Turku, Finland, (3e 2014), Leuphana University, Germany (3e 2015), University of Leeds (3e 2016). Next year’s conference moves to the University of Twente/Saxion University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands and then to the Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship, Sweden in 2018.  In terms of the value of the conference to the region, the Cork Convention Bureau puts the economic value to Cork at €160,00.00.