The early stage of new venture creation is highly undetermined, is high in uncertainty and requires action to progress. These characteristics overlap with the definition of what makes a problematic situation a design problem. In order to improve education for students to deal with this type of problem, this chapter builds on the paradigm of ‘through’ education and the new venture creation approach. It proposes a new paradigm, ‘entrepreneurship education through design’ with a strong focus dealing with design problems via designerly behaviour. This chapter highlights the design theoretical basis of this paradigm and shows how the course setup can contribute for students to display designerly behaviour, reduce uncertainty and ultimately successfully incubate new ventures.

This paper contains a first step towards a holistic understanding of fundamental elements in startups. It develops the first version of a framework based on theory on startup failure and validated by analysing interviews. It sets out directions for further research on this topic as a PhD-project.