Developing a public school entrepreneurship inventory: Theoretical conceptualization and empirical examination

Entrepreneurship is one of the fundamental strategies of business organizations. However, the unique characteristics of entrepreneurship in education have not been fully examined. This study examines the concept of entrepreneurship in a centralized educational system, presents a tool for measuring educational entrepreneurship, and demonstrates its relevance by inquiring into the relationship between a school's geo-social location and entrepreneurial profiles. The public school entrepreneurship inventory was tested on a representative sample of 1,395 elementary school teachers within the Israeli public school system. The results demonstrate high reliability and convergent validity of the instrument. The study explores the different entrepreneurial profiles existing within the Israeli educational system, and demonstrates the instrument's use in studying the degrees of freedom for school entrepreneurship in the same national expanse. The study has found that school entrepreneurship in the periphery is better able to exploit the freedom existing within the system than school entrepreneurship in the center. In all cases, however, this freedom is limited and schools’ entrepreneurship cannot go much beyond what is legitimized by the system. These findings are then explained by reference to the canonical mechanisms that serve as constant points of reference in a centralized educational system.