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One of the challenges of writing a book about E&I in Europe is that there are multiple perspectives on a continent so culturally diverse. We do not have the pretension of presenting “the” definitive and comprehensive view of this phenomenon for the continent, but simply “a” perspective from my own experience of teaching European students for over a decade in France.

To illustrate how differently E&I are perceived in Europe, Dodd et al. (2013) analyzed positive and negative metaphors associated with entrepreneurs in a continent-wide survey. Whereas 46% of Greeks had a negative attitude towards entrepreneurs (blood-sucking leeches), in Ireland 82.3% saw them positively (bright and illuminating rainbows). Table I.1 presents these differences.

Table I.1. Different perceptions about entrepreneurs across Europe (adapted from Dodd et al. 2013)

Positive images
% per country	Predominant metaphor
Ireland (82.3%)	Bright and illuminating rainbows
The Netherlands (73.8%)	Lubricating oil of economy
UK (72.5%)	Poets. They must invent new ideas and turn them into something profitable
Italy (70%)	The wings of freedom
Cyprus (65.5%)	A ship with a good captain. They know where the ship begins its voyage and where it docks. They have targets
Poland (49.3%)	Hunters – they are persistent on their aspirations for a success
Greece (41%)	Conductors of the orchestra
Negative images
% per country	Predominating metaphor
Greece (46%)	Leeches, because they suck the blood of the employees
Poland (26.2%)	Stone – insensitive to the needs of others
Italy (20.7%)	Leeches
Cyprus (20.5%)	Foxes – they try to sell their products in a treacherous way
UK (13.5%)	The historical titanic, the discovery shuttle
Ireland (7.3%)	Hares, running about all over the place
The Netherlands (5.7%)	Profiteer

If the tools adopted in Europe are the same that are being used in Silicon Valley, creating a new venture in the Old World remains a much harder exercise. According to Henrekson and Sanandaji (2018), Europe overall has an “entrepreneurship deficit” that is largely acknowledged in the public debate. We have a less dense institutional framework for innovation and the venture capital sector is less developed. Europe has fewer innovative firms and lower R&D efforts among startups.

Wright et al. (2007) show that whereas in the USA we have 140 adults per 10,000 in nascent ventures with an expectation of having more than 19 employees in the next five years, this number is much lower for European countries: 70 in the UK, 49 in Sweden, 46 in Germany, 38 in France and 16 in Belgium. This is not just a matter of creating startups, but also scaling them up. Table I.2 shows the number of large firms founded since 1990 in the USA, China and Europe, depicting the vast superiority of the Americans in this domain.

Table I.2. Entrepreneurship and value creation in different countries (adapted from Henrekson and Sanandaji 2018)

	Billionaire entrepreneurs per million	Number of startups valued at 1B+ (unicorns)	Large firms founded since 1990
USA	1.37	115	60
China	0.17	47	22
East Asia	0.55	8	19
Eastern Europe	0.13	1	2
Western Europe	0.47	22	18
Germany	0.52	5	3
UK	0.72	10	5
France	0.39	2	1
Italy	0.38	0	1
Spain	0.26	0	1
Nordic	0.62	2	0
Switzerland	1.75	1	2
Canada	1.06	2	3
Israel	1.75	2	1

This book is thus a humble attempt to contribute to narrowing this gap by sharing with teachers and students of E&I in Europe up-to-date tools and methods more widely used by the most dynamic startup clusters in the USA, by applying teaching and learning approaches based on constructivist principles.