What Is Entrepreneurship Education? The Difference from Startup-Skills Training, Japan's National Programs, and How High Schools Can Practice It

This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.

Entrepreneurship education is not a class on incorporation procedures or how to write a business plan. Yoichi Ito, dean of the Faculty of Entrepreneurship at Musashino University, defines entrepreneurship as "a mindset of stepping forward without fear of failure and creating new value, grounded in high aspirations and ethics"¹. What it cultivates is a mindset, not a skill set. That is why its audience is not limited to future founders — it includes everyone who will become a company employee, a public servant, or a teacher. The Japanese government has also gotten serious. Since FY2023, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has promoted the EDGE-PRIME Initiative, a core program that includes elementary through high school students², and the SME Support Organization (SMRJ), on the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) side, supports entrepreneurship education programs at high schools free of charge³. In this article, I lay out the definition of entrepreneurship education and how it differs from startup training, the lineage of Japan's national programs, the pioneering example of Musashino University's EMC, and how high schools can put it into practice — grounded in primary sources from public institutions and official university publications.

Three key points first.

• Entrepreneurship education is not "startup-skills education" but "mindset-and-action education." Its leading advocates consistently argue that the people who need it most are the ones who will never start a company.
• National support expanded from the university-focused EDGE and EDGE-NEXT programs to the EDGE-PRIME Initiative for elementary through high school students, accelerating sharply after the Startup Development Five-Year Plan of November 2022.
• The entry point for high schools is the Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study. The fund created under the N-E.X.T. High School Vision, launched in 2026, is a strong tailwind.

It is not a "startup class": defining entrepreneurship education

Let me start with the definition. Rather than lining up dictionary entries, it is faster to look at the words of the person leading this field in Japan.

Yoichi Ito, dean of Musashino University's Faculty of Entrepreneurship (known as EMC), defined entrepreneurship this way in a lecture for high school career-guidance teachers: "a mindset of stepping forward without fear of failure and creating new value, grounded in high aspirations and ethics." He added that "something with aspiration but no ethics must not be allowed to exist in society"¹. Aspiration, ethics, the courage to step forward, the creation of value. Nowhere in that four-part set does "founding a company" appear. In the same lecture, Ito also said that "accepting failure is the fundamental premise of entrepreneurship — it is how you become able to do new things"¹. Education here includes building an environment where failure is not treated as a deduction.

The government's definition points the same way. MEXT positions entrepreneurship education as "education that builds the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes to take on challenges toward solving problems and to explore solutions in collaboration with others"². Challenge, collaboration, inquiry. Again, no mention of incorporation. That the national definition leans toward attitudes rather than skills is an essential point for understanding this field.

So how does it differ from the older notion of "startup training"? Comparing it with startup training in the narrow sense brings the outline into focus.

	Startup training (narrow sense)	Entrepreneurship education
Main purpose	Acquiring skills directly tied to founding a company, such as incorporation and business planning	Cultivating a mindset of stepping forward without fear of failure and creating new value
Main audience	People who intend to start a business	Everyone, whether they start a business or not
Core content	Business plans, fundraising, incorporation procedures	Putting aspirations into words, dialogue, small actions and reflection
Image of success	Number of startups founded, businesses launched	More people who can pose their own questions and act

What complicates matters is that in Japanese policy practice, the two terms are used interchangeably. For example, SMRJ's high school program is called an "entrepreneurship (kigyoka) education program," yet it is designed to run inside the Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study or extracurricular activities, and its content is closer to mindset education³. If a school judges by the name alone — "we are not a startup-oriented school, so this is not for us" — it will overlook support it could use. Judge by the content, not the label. That is the practical rule of thumb.

There is one more correspondence I want high school teachers to know. Japan's Courses of Study for upper secondary schools set, among the goals of the Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study, "cultivating an attitude of creating new value and striving to realize a better society"⁴. That is almost the same language as the "mindset of creating new value" in Ito's definition. In other words, before being a special program brought in from outside, entrepreneurship education is already written into the goals of a required subject that every high school student in Japan takes. I will return to what this correspondence means in practice in the second half of this article.

Why everyone needs it: company employees, public servants, and teachers too

"Most of our students will never start a company — why entrepreneurship?" Whenever I speak at schools, this question comes up. It is a fair one.

Ito's answer is unambiguous: "Entrepreneurship translates literally as 'the founder's spirit,' but it does not belong only to people who start companies. It is something every person must have"¹. In a high school lecture reported by Kyoiku Shimbun (the Education Newspaper), he told students: "Entrepreneurship is not a word only for starting businesses. Company employees, public servants, teachers — everyone needs it. It simply means doing what you want to do. I want you to become aware of it early"⁵. That lecture was held as part of inquiry-based learning at Shimotsuma First High School and its attached junior high school in Ibaraki Prefecture, with about 480 students attending — and the staging was handled by the students themselves⁵.

Why everyone? A phrase Ito uses almost synonymously with entrepreneurship is "Lead the Self": leading yourself, carving out your own future based on your own will⁶. Put the other way around, it means not living a life that merely traces other people's expectations. And the method of the education converges on a single point. Ito states flatly that "the essence of entrepreneurship education is to keep asking, 'What do you want to do?'" — and that career education is the same¹. Not pouring in knowledge, but continuing to pose the question. It sounds simple, yet for a school culture optimized around teaching correct answers, it is a substantial turn.

Another part of Ito's argument I like is his rejection of the talent theory. "Whether someone awakens to something is not a matter of innate quality but a difference in action." Talking and trying matter, and "trying" matters most¹. Mindset education can sound like an exercise in attitude adjustment, but in reality it is education in action. Act small, reflect, notice. Understand it as a design for increasing the number of those cycles, and how to handle it in a classroom becomes visible.

Let me add my own observation. TIMEWELL's core business is helping companies adopt AI, and now that generative AI handles "producing the correct answer" with ease, I feel daily that the center of human work is shifting toward "deciding what you want to do, and stepping forward." Document summaries and first-draft code come out of AI in minutes. What separates people is whether they can say, in their own words, what they want to do next. That is precisely what entrepreneurship education is trying to cultivate. Incidentally, Ito noted in his lecture that Japan's level of entrepreneurship ranks a lowly 26th in the world¹. I prefer to read that as nothing but room to grow.

The lineage of national programs: from EDGE to the EDGE-PRIME Initiative

Government support for entrepreneurship education in Japan has more than a decade of history behind it. The names are confusingly similar, so here is the overview first.

Program	Ministry or implementing body	Main audience	Current status
EDGE program (Global Entrepreneur Development Promotion)	MEXT	University and graduate students	Ended7
EDGE-NEXT (Next-Generation Entrepreneur Development)	MEXT	University consortia	Ended7
National Entrepreneurship Human Resource Development Program	MEXT (contracted to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu LLC)	University, graduate, and technical college students (a small number of high schoolers may join)	Started FY2022, ongoing8
EDGE-PRIME Initiative	MEXT	Elementary through high school and technical college students	Started FY2023, ongoing core program2
Entrepreneurship Education Program Implementation Support	SME Support Organization (SMRJ, METI side)	High schools, technical colleges (years 1 to 3), and others	Ongoing, free of charge3

Put into words, the flow looks like this. MEXT's support began with the EDGE program for university and graduate students, then developed into EDGE-NEXT, in which multiple universities formed consortia. Both are now listed as concluded programs⁷. The turning point was the Startup Development Five-Year Plan the government adopted in November 2022. MEXT states that under this plan it contributes by creating startup-ecosystem environments built on universities' research outcomes⁷.

The current core is the EDGE-PRIME Initiative. MEXT has promoted it since FY2023, delivering entrepreneurship education to students from elementary school through high school and technical colleges². A kickoff event was held at CIC Tokyo on June 3, 2023⁹, and a national forum followed on March 15, 2025¹⁰. There is also a mechanism of "Entrepreneurship Promotion Ambassadors," appointed by the Minister of Education and dispatched to school classes and events. Ten were originally appointed in January 2023 under the title "startup education promotion ambassadors"; the name was later changed and the scope of dispatch broadened². For university students, the National Entrepreneurship Human Resource Development Program has been running since FY2022, and a small number of high school students can take part⁸. I dig into the program in detail in the guide to the EDGE-PRIME Initiative, so if the policy side interests you, start there.

The METI-side move deserves attention too. SMRJ's Entrepreneurship Education Program Implementation Support helps high school teachers run entrepreneurship classes using a standard curriculum. Schools choose from annual plans of 5, 10, 20, or 30 hours; entrepreneur guest lecturers visit two to four times; and everything through the final presentation event is free of charge. It can run inside the Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study, in regular subjects, or as an extracurricular activity³. Participating schools grew from 4 in FY2022 to 20 in FY2024³. Frankly, this program is still not well known — despite everything it offers at no cost.

Tracing the lineage reveals one clear current: support that began at universities came down to elementary, junior high, and high schools all at once after the Five-Year Plan. Entrepreneurship education is no longer an experiment at a few pioneering universities. It is national education policy that includes primary and secondary schooling.

The pioneering university example: Musashino University's Faculty of Entrepreneurship (EMC)

Before turning to high school practice, one university example is worth examining closely: the Faculty of Entrepreneurship opened at Musashino University in April 2021, known as EMC (Entrepreneurship Musashino Campus)¹¹. As a faculty carrying "entrepreneurship" in its name, it is the symbolic presence in this field.

The road to establishment was apparently not smooth. Ito recalled in his lecture that approval from MEXT was slow to come at first — the entrance exam was even canceled once — and that the wind shifted dramatically once the government began championing startup support and entrepreneurship education¹. The policy lineage we just traced was shaping the fate of a single faculty. Institutional tailwinds matter that much in practice.

EMC's curriculum has three distinct features. It is practice-based, centered on project-type courses in which students actually run businesses inside their classes. Most of its faculty are active practitioners — venture founders, NPO founders. And in the first year, all students live and learn together in a dormitory¹¹. Ito describes the course design this way: 10 percent of class time goes to input, 90 percent is interactive, and the faculty devote themselves to coaching — because a mindset cannot be taught, students have to think, reflect, and talk it through themselves¹. The faculty's educational philosophy is "to increase the number of people who genuinely believe they can make the world a better place through their own thinking and action"¹¹.

A word on Ito's own background. After graduating from the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Economics, he worked at the Industrial Bank of Japan and the stationery maker PLUS, then led Yahoo Academia, Yahoo Japan's leadership development institute, before becoming dean of EMC in 2021¹². Many readers will know him as the author of the bestseller "Ichi-pun de Hanase" (Speak in One Minute).

As an aside, I am personally involved in supporting education at Musashino University's Faculty of Entrepreneurship. What strikes me up close is that students describe themselves not by what they know but by what they have done. A student will recount a project that did not work out — cheerfully, without a trace of embarrassment. More than once I found myself being the one taught what a failure-tolerant culture actually looks like.

There is also a bridge to high schools. EMC officially runs an online seminar for high school students, a place where faculty and students share their experiences and aspirations and encourage growth through moments of realization¹³. For a high school, the university example works as a reference book for a future four years ahead.

How high schools can practice it: the entry point is inquiry-based learning

So where should a high school start? No new subject and no curriculum overhaul are needed. The entry point already exists: the Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study.

The subject is required, with a standard allocation of 3 to 6 credits¹⁴, and as we saw, its goals include "cultivating an attitude of creating new value and striving to realize a better society"⁴. Rather than building a new framework from scratch for entrepreneurship education, the realistic path — and the one aligned with the Courses of Study — is to weave the mindset elements into the existing inquiry framework. How to embed the question "What do you want to do?" into the inquiry process is something I cover down to the design level in the article on inquiry-based learning and entrepreneurship.

On the practical side, Ito's advice is concrete. At commercial and agricultural high schools, when students actually sell products or crops, their persuasiveness changes completely; a prototype is fine — the point is to actually sell it¹. As a way to root a culture of dialogue in a school, he also describes an exercise in which every student gives a one-minute self-introduction three times while classmates respond with encouragement. Anyone becomes able to speak reliably, he says¹. No special tools, no budget. You can try it in class today. If you want outside help, SMRJ's program mentioned above is free³, and I have compiled how other schools took their first steps in the article on high school case studies in entrepreneurship education.

An institutional tailwind has begun to blow as well: the N-E.X.T. High School Vision — formally the "Basic Policy (Grand Design) for High School Education Reform" — published by MEXT on February 13, 2026¹⁵. The FY2025 supplementary budget created a 295.5 billion yen High School Education Reform Promotion Fund¹⁶, and on June 30, 2026, the selection of 75 lead schools and related entities was announced¹⁷. Among the selected schools' project names are "Building a Startup Education Hub" (Hamamatsu Technical High School, Shizuoka) and the "Higashi-Okayama Technical Digital and Entrepreneur Hub Project" (Higashi-Okayama Technical High School, Okayama)¹⁷. The Grand Design itself lists "making business experience mandatory" and "high-school versions of corporate endowed courses" as example initiatives for vocational high schools¹⁵. Even in the Super Science High School (SSH) program, "entrepreneurship education and related themes" is explicitly named in one of the priority-track categories¹⁸. Entrepreneurship education is moving from the extracurricular passion project of a few schools into the mainstream of high school reform. For the full picture of the vision, see the guide to the N-E.X.T. High School Vision; for the role vocational high schools play in the reform, see the article on advanced essential workers.

The spread of generative AI is, in fact, another tailwind. Prototyping, analyzing surveys, drafting presentation materials — much of the work that used to exhaust students before they ever "stepped forward" can now be shouldered by AI, lowering the bar for students to reach a real output. How to use AI in inquiry classes without letting it take over students' thinking is covered in the practical article on high school inquiry-based learning and generative AI.

At TIMEWELL, too, through WARP for Schools, our program for schools and educational institutions, we work alongside schools to design entrepreneurship education and inquiry-based learning that uses generative AI. We have been involved in developing more than 500 people and have worked on a partnership project with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (WARP ENTRE). If you are at a school and unsure where to begin, an exchange of information is a perfectly good place to start — please take a look.

Summary

• Entrepreneurship education cultivates a mindset of stepping forward without fear of failure and creating new value, grounded in high aspirations and ethics (Yoichi Ito's definition). Its purpose and audience differ from startup-skills training.
• The audience is everyone. Company employees, public servants, and teachers all need it — this is Ito's consistent argument, and MEXT's definition likewise leans toward attitudes over skills.
• National support has passed through EDGE and EDGE-NEXT to the EDGE-PRIME Initiative for elementary through high school students, and SMRJ's free program is available to high schools on the METI side.
• The pioneering university example is Musashino University's EMC, opened in 2021 — practice-based, taught by active practitioners, with a first-year dormitory system — giving form to the idea that a mindset grows only through dialogue and action.
• The high school entry point is the Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study, with the N-E.X.T. High School Vision fund and the SSH priority track as institutional tailwinds.

One last thought. The question "What do you want to do?" is not aimed only at students. When the teacher bringing this education into a school, the principal, and outside supporters like us turn the same question on ourselves, that is when the air in the classroom changes. Receiving entrepreneurship education not as "something to teach someone" but as "something that questions me too" — that is the stance I value most in this work.

---

References

Related articles

• What Is the EDGE-PRIME Initiative? MEXT's Core Entrepreneurship Education Program Explained
• High School Case Studies in Entrepreneurship Education, with the Public Programs You Can Use
• Building Entrepreneurship into Inquiry-Based Learning: Designing Around "What Do You Want to Do?"
• What Is the N-E.X.T. High School Vision? A Clear Guide to MEXT's High School Reform
• What Are Advanced Essential Workers? Reading the Upgrade of Vocational High Schools
• High School Inquiry-Based Learning × Generative AI: Practical Steps to Empower Students

Footnotes

1. Aomori Prefectural High School Education Research Association, 48th Career Guidance Division Research Conference, keynote lecture "Entrepreneurship Education and Career Education" (FY2024 research bulletin; lecturer Yoichi Ito) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. MEXT, "Board of Education Monthly, May 2024 issue, Feature 2: Entrepreneurship Education for High School Students — The Spread of the EDGE-PRIME Initiative and Its Further Expansion" ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. SME Support Organization (SMRJ), "FY2025 Entrepreneurship Education Program Implementation Support: Explanatory Materials" ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. MEXT, "Comparison Table of the Courses of Study for Upper Secondary Schools: Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study" (2018 revision) ↩ ↩²

5. Kyoiku Shimbun, "'This Is Entrepreneurship Itself': Yoichi Ito Lectures, Students Handle the Staging" ↩ ↩²

6. Musashino University EMC official note, "We Are Creating a New Faculty at Musashino University" (April 2, 2020, written by Yoichi Ito) ↩

7. MEXT, "MEXT Startup Support Programs" ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. MEXT, "National Entrepreneurship Promotion Program" ↩ ↩²

9. MEXT, "EDGE-PRIME Initiative Kickoff Event" (June 3, 2023) ↩

10. MEXT, "EDGE-PRIME Initiative National Forum on Expanding Entrepreneurship Education for Elementary Through High School Students" (March 15, 2025) ↩

11. Musashino University Faculty of Entrepreneurship (EMC) official site ↩ ↩² ↩³

12. Musashino University, "Department of Entrepreneurship: Faculty Introduction" ↩

13. Musashino University, "EMC Online Seminar for High School Students" ↩

14. MEXT, "Subjects Common to All Departments and Standard Credit Allocations" (2018 revision, Courses of Study for Upper Secondary Schools) ↩

15. MEXT, "Basic Policy (Grand Design) for High School Education Reform: The N-E.X.T. High School Vision for 2040" (February 13, 2026) ↩ ↩²

16. MEXT, "Establishment of the High School Education Reform Promotion Fund" (Industrial Education Working Group, reference material 2, February 20, 2026) ↩

17. MEXT, "FY2025 Program for High School Education Reform Contributing to Industrial Innovation Human Resource Development: List of Selected Projects" (announced June 30, 2026) ↩ ↩²

18. MEXT and JST, "Super Science High School (SSH) Support Program" (FY2026, Attachment 2) ↩