Extracurricular Entrepreneurship Initiatives as Institutional Work: Insights From Latin America

Entrepreneurship education research has largely focused on how formal courses and pedagogical design shape entrepreneurial skills, intentions, and learning outcomes. Yet in contexts marked by institutional voids, the central challenge is not only educational but also institutional: students may develop entrepreneurial interest and capabilities while still lacking reliable access to the external networks, legitimacy, and resources required for venture creation. This tension is especially visible in Latin America, where high levels of entrepreneurial activity coexist with fragmented support infrastructures, informality, and uneven ecosystem development. We argue that extracurricular entrepreneurship initiatives such as incubators, hackathons, mentoring programs, and venture competitions should therefore be understood as mechanisms through which universities address this concern. Drawing on institutional theory, we conceptualize these initiatives as forms of institutional work through which universities create compensatory structures that reshape roles, norms, and linkages across university and regional entrepreneurial ecosystems. This perspective advances entrepreneurship education theory by shifting attention from student-level learning outcomes to the university’s role in constructing the conditions under which entrepreneurial action becomes feasible. In doing so, we reposition universities as institutional actors that help mitigate institutional fragility and support entrepreneurship in emerging-economy contexts.