Key success factors of entrepreneurial coaching for entrepreneurship education programmes: a coaches' perspective

By taking the poorly considered perspective of coaches, this study aims to disentangle the impact of coaching within entrepreneurship education programs, specifically considering the opportunity development process, i.e., a process of translation leading from an abstract idea to its concretization. We adopt a qualitative approach to elucidate the dimensions that constitute the effectiveness of the intervention as perceived by coaches. By relying on 22 semi-structured narrative interviews our results have highlighted the following dimensions as critical for a successful coaching intervention: the coach's expertise, the entrepreneur's cognitive and emotional involvement, the structure of coaching intervention, and the dimension of the quality of the relationship between the coach and entrepreneur. Drawing from these results, we have elaborated a framework of key determinants of coaching intervention that can serve as a valuable evidence-based tool for improving the effectiveness of this kind of support in entrepreneurship education programs. This work contributes to the current debate by providing a novel empirical perspective that clearly highlights the aforementioned interlinked dimensions as the critical success factors of entrepreneurial coaching in the opportunity development process.