Entrepreneurial Coaching

Entrepreneurial Coaching is increasingly used across enterprise education and startup support, but it remains under-defined as a distinct practice. This SIG brings together enterprise educators, coaches and practitioner-researchers to share approaches, strengthen professional practice, and build an evidence base for coaching entrepreneurs.

Coaching is a common mode of enterprise support, yet ‘coaching entrepreneurs’ often demands different judgments from traditional leadership coaching. The focus on the entrepreneur’s identity, decisions, uncertainty and resource constraints means a balance of executive, workplace and life coaching is often required. Entrepreneurial coaching is a growing field of scholarship, but still fragmented, with inconsistent definitions, outcomes, and models of practice.

This SIG provides a home for a growing community of practice already doing this work in HE and beyond. By clarifying and defining entrepreneurial coaching, it will articulate what entrepreneurial coaching is and what it is not, to improve quality and consistency. We will also support members to adapt their practice-based insights into publishable outputs and practical resources to support effective coaching across student, graduate, and early-stage entrepreneurship contexts. Through this work, the SIG will create pathways to research, policy engagement, and continuing professional development (CPD).

The SIG has the following aims:

• Convene a community of practice that brings together enterprise educators and coaches who are supporting entrepreneurs. Members are invited to share tools, lived dilemmas, supervision approaches and emerging practice-based evidence.
• Clarify and define entrepreneurial coaching, including its scope, boundaries, and how it relates to (and differs from) executive, workplace and life coaching across different contexts such as student startups, accelerators and SMEs.
• Support members to produce practical resources for the EEUK community, such as toolkits, contracting templates and evaluation frameworks that support high-quality entrepreneurial coaching practice.
• Host activities and events that make entrepreneurial coaching more visible and better understood.

The SIG has been convened by Beki Gowing, University of the Arts London,  b.gowing@fashion.arts.ac.uk.

To sign up for the SIG, please join the EEUK mailing list and tick the box for the Entrepreneurial Coaching.

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To view the SIG LinkedIn page, click here.