Entrepreneurship, teams and sustainability: A series of field experiments

This dissertation reports the results from three field experiments that were conducted within the setting of one of the leading, internationally renowned entrepreneurship education programs for primary schools called BizWorld. The first field experiment evaluates the program’s effectiveness in terms of the development of entrepreneurship knowledge and a set of non-cognitive skills relevant for entrepreneurial activity. The results indicate that the program has a robust positive effect on non-cognitive entrepreneurial skills. The aim of the second experiment is to test how skill composition affects team performance and whether (a lack of) individual balanced skills can be substituted by combining the skills of various specialists within one team. The results show that balanced skills are beneficial to team performance, and that it is hard to effectively combine different specialists within one team. The third experiment investigates how to induce sustainable behavior in a productive setting. The results indicate that, in this setting, (financial) incentives are required to effectively motivate sustainable behavior.