Engaging Literature Students in Entrepreneurship: Could use of art Help? Alexandros Kakouris and Panagiotis Liargovas Department of Management Science and Technology, University of Peloponnese, Greece a.kakouris@uop.gr Abstract: Entrepreneurship educators seek innovative teaching in entrepreneurship in order to engage youth populations in venturing by instilling them the entrepreneurial mindset whilst the contemporary progression of entrepreneurship education encompasses its embedded form to other discipline curricula. At a Greek central university, such courses are massively attended by foreign language and literature students during the last decade. In the present implementation, literature students were encouraged to either perform the usual business plan or to analyse a piece of art for their entrepreneurial courses’ project. Pre/post measurements (N=64) for entrepreneurial self-efficacy, entrepreneurial success beliefs and entrepreneurial intention were conducted in order to compare the two groups. T-tests indicate that changes to the entrepreneurial constructs do not significantly vary between the groups. Through a binary logistic regression model, it was found that art-projects were chosen by those who rely more on personal abilities for the success of their initiatives. The article concludes that introducing art in entrepreneurial teaching conforms with some curricular contexts, like literature, affects students in a similar manner with the business plan, but also confronts different learning needs and enables critical thinking and personal autonomy on entrepreneurial meaning-making. The present study offers quantitative insights on how art-based entrepreneurship education could be employed in classrooms compounded with interactive lectures offering new perspectives for enriching the entrepreneurial teaching toolbox. Keywords: entrepreneurship education, embedded entrepreneurship, art-based education, aesthetic experience, humanities, critical thinking 1. Introduction A current classification of different forms of entrepreneurship education pertains to its “about”, “for” and “through” forms (Kakouris and Liargovas 2021a). There is also the embedded (or in) form of entrepreneurship education when entrepreneurship is embedded or integrated in other disciplines across the curricula that aligns with its “through” form (Pittaway and Edwards 2012). Concerning the last two forms of entrepreneurship education (for and through), there are many studies which support that entrepreneurial courses increase the students’ entrepreneurial intention (e.g. Wilson, Kickul and Marlino 2007), others that doubt it (Bae et al. 2014; Rideout and Gray 2013) and some with mixed results (e.g. Fayolle and Gailly 2015, Nabi et al. 2018). Concurrently, there are studies which suggest effective entrepreneurship education has to become more context-aware (Ramsgaard and Blenker 2021, Saukkonen and Kakouris 2022, Thomassen et al. 2020, Welter 2011). Hence, embedding entrepreneurship to other disciplines has to adapt to different contexts both in teaching content and methods without sufficient educational research on how these adaptations are possible and efficient. Thus, the present article focuses to entrepreneurial teaching to literature students and the wider field of humanities. Drawing upon a previous article for utilising art-based education in entrepreneurship (Kakouris and Liargovas 2021b) art-based projects were implemented in entrepreneurial teaching to literature students as alternatives to the common business plans. This is actually follow-up research of Kakouris and Liargovas (2021b) implementing teaching through the arts to humanities students in a central Greek university who attended an optional entrepreneurial course. The current research questions could be: (a) who prefer not to conduct a business plan? and (b) does teaching through the arts in entrepreneurship facilitate students from humanities and in what way? The adoption of art in relevant projects might be considered an entrepreneurial teaching innovation along with adaptation of entrepreneurial teaching methods to the specific discipline’s context. The research approach is quantitative in order to map pre/post measurements of basic entrepreneurial constructs affected, or not, for the two groups of trainees, i.e. those who preferred the business plan project (hereafter BP) versus those who preferred the analysis of art projects (hereafter ART). In the remaining of the article, first the theoretical framework with research hypotheses is developed and afterwards the research methodology is presented. The quantitative data are statistically analysed and the results are presented. In the last part of the article a discussion of the findings along with implications for educators, educational bodies and researchers is provided before the final conclusions. The present research is 297 Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, ECIE 2022