Resumo

Despite the proliferation of courses and programs in Brazil and around the world and the academic works that seek to understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, an empirical consensus has yet to be reached regarding how to teach it. Katz et al. (2016) attempted to arrive at a specific curriculum for entrepreneurship by researching two established patterns: the American and the European. They concluded that it was the first step towards promoting an academic discussion on entrepreneurship education and invites other researchers to continue the discussion.

Due to the gap presented in the introduction and the need to establish fundamental ideas in entrepreneurship education to advance the theory and aid teachers, the present study seeks to determine what should be taught in an entrepreneurship course in order to map the fundamental ideas of entrepreneurship courses.

About entrepreneurship, the focus of the bibliographic research for this study will be on Schumpeter, McClelland and Drucker, as these authors represent the traditional theoretical perspective of entrepreneurship, as well as authors that discuss more recent approaches. Fundamental ideas were understood from the epistemology proposed by Bruner (1960) and were analyzed from the characteristics discussed in the studies of Machado (2014) and Schweiger (2006). The map shows us what is fundamental as an instrument of representation.

The study is exploratory and the approach is qualitative, given the need for dialogue with theoretical sources. Documents pertaining to 60 Entrepreneurship courses at five Brazilian universities were researched. A subsequent comparative analysis of the keywords in the theory and documents, selected using content analysis, was also performed.

Were analyzed 60 syllabuses referring to the subjects of entrepreneurship of 5 Brazilian universities. The highest concentrations of entrepreneurship were in engineering and management, followed by management. The co-occurrence analyses show that some words have the of four dimensions of the fundamental ideas: time, vertical, horizontal and human, with the horizontal and interdisciplinary dimension being conceptually similar and thus not repeated in the analysis. From these fundamental ideas a content map was elaborated.

Given that there was no uniformity in the contents of the syllabuses of the courses in question, this article provides theoretical and empirical insight into some fundamental ideas that might serve as the framework for planning this type of course, helping to improve the theoretical understanding of this field.

The references used to base the proposed discussion theoretically were not necessarily the most current ones, but the ones most directed to the approaches in question, considered as seminal to the themes.