Entrepreneurship Education in Japanese High Schools: Real Case Studies and the Patterns Behind Success

This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.

Entrepreneurship education in Japanese high schools is defined by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) as education that builds "the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes to take on challenges toward solving problems and to explore solutions in collaboration with others"¹. Since FY2023, the national EDGE-PRIME Initiative has served as the government's core program, and the range of real cases has grown steadily — from free public programs any school can use, to a school where students run an actual joint-stock company. In this article, I gather only the domestic cases that can be confirmed through primary sources — government documents and official school announcements — and distill the success patterns they share, along with a realistic path for starting at your own school.

I have spent years working alongside high school and university students in AI talent development, and over the past year the number of teachers asking me "we've been told to do entrepreneurship education — where do we even start?" has clearly grown. When you dig in, the government documentation is actually quite rich. What is missing is any article that reads across it all. Three key points up front.

• Since FY2023 the government has gone all-in on entrepreneurship education for school-age students, with the EDGE-PRIME Initiative at the core. Ready-to-use public support, including SMRJ's free program, is now in place
• School-driven cases exist too: at Gifu Commercial High School, students have run GIFUSHO Inc., a real company, for nearly a decade
• Documented success cases share three patterns: actually selling and building, contact with outside practitioners, and designs that tolerate failure

What entrepreneurship education means, and the tailwinds of the past few years

Look at MEXT's definition once more: education that builds "the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes to take on challenges toward solving problems and to explore solutions in collaboration with others"¹. The first thing you notice is that the word "startup" does not appear in it. This is not education in how to incorporate a company or raise capital. It is education that produces people who can find a problem themselves and act on it with others. Given that the national definition reads this way, the theme is open to academic-track schools just as much as commercial or technical high schools.

The tailwind began with the government's Startup Development Five-Year Plan, decided in November 2022². Following it, MEXT has promoted the EDGE-PRIME Initiative since FY2023 as its core program for entrepreneurship education spanning elementary school through high school and technical college¹. A kickoff event was held at CIC Tokyo in Toranomon on June 3, 2023³, followed by a national forum on March 15, 2025⁴. MEXT's support for entrepreneurship education had previously accumulated at the university level through the EDGE and EDGE-NEXT programs². Over the past few years, it has finally come down in earnest to the high school level and below.

The institutional changes matter too. In January 2023, the Minister of Education appointed ten "Entrepreneurship Education Ambassadors," later renamed "Entrepreneurship Promotion Ambassadors," and expanded their dispatch beyond national events to school classes, school events, and local government programs¹. A school can now apply directly and have the national framework match and dispatch an entrepreneur. For schools with no network of outside talent, that is a genuinely practical change.

And in 2026, entrepreneurship education began connecting to the main stage of high school reform. Among the 75 reform-leading schools adopted under the High School Education Reform Promotion Fund (295.5 billion yen in the FY2025 supplementary budget), based on MEXT's N-E.X.T. High School Initiative, are Hamamatsu Technical High School in Shizuoka, whose plan is titled around building a startup education hub, and Higashi-Okayama Technical High School in Okayama, whose plan carries "Digital and Entrepreneur Hub" in its name⁵. The Super Science High School (SSH) program likewise now names "entrepreneurship education" explicitly in its priority-track category for innovation co-creation⁶. I cover the full policy background in the guide to the N-E.X.T. High School Initiative and the analysis of the 75 reform-leading schools.

In short, entrepreneurship education is shifting from an extracurricular pursuit of a few ambitious schools to one of the pillars of national high school reform. The question is what to actually do on the ground. Let's look at the domestic cases that primary sources confirm.

The cases: from public programs to a company run by students

Here is the overview. Every case below is confirmed by MEXT documents, the implementing organization's official materials, the school's official website, or press coverage.

Case	Lead organization	What students experience	Source
KSAC Entrepreneurs Day	KSAC, a Kansai university platform	High schoolers pitch their own ideas in three minutes	MEXT board of education bulletin1
HOKKAIDO INNOVATION HUNTER	HSFC, Hokkaido	Reports by 8 teams, 27 students, plus workshops	MEXT board of education bulletin1
Entrepreneurship education program support	SMRJ	Classes on a standard curriculum plus dialogue with entrepreneur lecturers	SMRJ program guide7
GIFUSHO Inc.	Gifu Commercial High School	The entire student body holds shares in a real company students manage	Official school site8, Japan Sales Professionals Association9
Entrepreneur lecture within inquiry learning	Shimotsuma First High School, Ibaraki	About 480 students attend — and produce — a lecture by Yoichi Ito	Kyoiku Shimbun10
EMC Online Seminar for High Schoolers	Musashino University Faculty of Entrepreneurship	An online seminar connecting high schoolers with faculty and students	Musashino University official site11

Using the national framework as the entry point: EDGE-PRIME and SMRJ

The showcase events held around the country give the clearest picture of what EDGE-PRIME looks like in practice. On February 10, 2024, "KSAC Entrepreneurs Day," hosted by the Kansai Startup Academia Coalition (KSAC), a platform centered on universities in the Kansai region, drew a cumulative 600 participants¹. The centerpiece was "DOON!Pitch," in which high school students who had taken on various challenges presented their own ideas and projects, and the passion behind them, in three minutes each. MEXT's own account records that many attendees stopped to listen and the event was charged with energy¹. About a month later, on March 9, 2024, "HOKKAIDO INNOVATION HUNTER," hosted by HSFC, a network centered on Hokkaido's universities, featured reports from 8 teams and 27 students representing school-age participants who had received entrepreneurship education through channels including the period for integrated inquiry¹. What the two events share is that the high schoolers stand on the presenting side. The student's position is completely different from a lecture they sit through.

For schools that want to bring this into the classroom directly, the most concrete option is the entrepreneurship education program support run by SMRJ, the Organization for Small and Medium Enterprises and Regional Innovation, an incorporated administrative agency in the METI family. SMRJ supports teachers in delivering entrepreneurship classes using a standard curriculum, available in four sizes: 5, 10, 20, or 30 class hours⁷. It includes two to four visits from outside lecturers such as entrepreneurs, a showcase event, and publication in a casebook — at no cost to the school (communication and travel expenses excepted)⁷. The permitted settings are broad as well: the period for integrated inquiry, regular subjects, extracurricular activities, and even preparation for admissions-office entrance exams⁷.

The track record is public. Participating schools grew from 4 in FY2022 (Aomori Yamada High School, Shibaura Institute of Technology Junior and Senior High School, Sakai High School in Fukui, and Rubeshibe High School in Hokkaido) to 10 in FY2023 and 20 in FY2024⁷. The FY2023 roster includes commercial schools such as Fukushima Commercial, Yokkaichi Commercial, and Nara Prefectural Commercial High School — but also Miyagi Agricultural High School and Shizuoka Kita High School⁷. This is not just a commercial-track story; it has spread to agricultural schools and private academic schools. Another 20 to 30 schools are planned for FY2025⁷.

When the school or a university takes the lead: Gifu Commercial, Shimotsuma First, Musashino

Some schools built the machinery themselves without waiting for a public program. The landmark case is GIFUSHO Inc. at Gifu Commercial High School. In February 2016, the school established a joint-stock company whose business is product development and sales, with the entire student body as shareholders⁹. Graduates and PTA officers serve as directors, and third-year students take on product development and sales practice through their capstone research classes⁹. This is not a mock company; it is a real, incorporated one. The school's official site shows a student CEO and student executive officers, and an expanding record of activity: exhibiting at a tourism and products expo in Taiwan in October 2023, launching a co-branded credit card in February 2024, and starting a convenience store print-service business in October 2025⁸. As an aside, what impressed me most in the documents was not the surface story. Rather than letting students play at being executives, the school built a proper adult framework — a board of directors, a management consignment arrangement — and then gave students real decisions to make inside it. Securing seriousness through structure is a design worth copying.

Even a lecture format can become part of inquiry learning if designed well. Shimotsuma First High School and its attached junior high in Ibaraki invited Yoichi Ito, dean of Musashino University's Faculty of Entrepreneurship, as part of its inquiry-learning curriculum, with about 480 first- and second-year students attending. The distinctive part: students handled the staging of the event themselves¹⁰. According to Kyoiku Shimbun's report, Ito told them that "something you saw through to the end is not a failure" and that "what matters is talking about dreams together"¹⁰. Not a lecture you attend and forget, but an event students build. That single twist turns a school assembly into inquiry material.

Universities are opening their doors to high schoolers directly as well. Musashino University's Faculty of Entrepreneurship (EMC) officially runs an online seminar for high school students, in which faculty and university students share their own experiences and aspirations to spark growth through moments of realization¹¹. The faculty, founded in 2021, is a practice-first program in which most instructors are active practitioners. I am personally involved in supporting education at this faculty, and I can feel firsthand how the energy of university-level entrepreneurship education is opening toward high schools. For a high school looking for a university partner, an official program like this is an accessible first step.

Three success patterns the cases share

Lining up cases and stopping there would make this a catalog. Here is the real point. Reading through the primary sources, three clear commonalities emerge among the initiatives that work.

The first is having students actually sell or build something, even if it is only a prototype. In a lecture to high school career-guidance teachers in Aomori, Yoichi Ito said that "at commercial and agricultural high schools, when students actually try it — selling products or crops — their persuasiveness becomes completely different," and recommended that for product development, a prototype is fine, as long as students actually sell it¹². GIFUSHO is precisely that pattern implemented: the purchasing, the selling, and the settlement are all real. A class where students write business plans on paper, versus a class where they receive real money, even a hundred yen. It is the latter where students' faces change — I have seen it repeatedly in my own work. The venue can be a school festival stall or a local morning market. I believe no teaching material beats the feedback of whether a real customer opens their wallet.

The second is building contact with outside practitioners into the structure. SMRJ's program includes two to four entrepreneur lecturer visits as standard⁷, and MEXT's promotion ambassadors are now a system premised on dispatch into school classes¹. The lecture at Shimotsuma First and EMC's online seminar share the same core: students talking directly with adults who have actually started something. Teachers do not need to teach everything. If anything, bringing in an outsider who can talk honestly about a failed business is coordination work only a teacher can do.

The third is designing for failure tolerance. Ito defines entrepreneurship as "the mindset of stepping forward without fearing failure, grounded in high aspiration and ethics, to create new value," and has repeatedly said that "accepting failure is the fundamental premise of entrepreneurship — it is how people become able to do new things"¹². In the same lecture he added, "one more important thing is to never laugh at dreams. The environment has to be one where everyone can speak their dream and step into action"¹². Translating that into a classroom comes down entirely to evaluation design. Grade students on revenue or prizes, and they will only attempt small challenges they cannot fail. Evaluate the number of attempts and the depth of reflection instead. Give points precisely for the well-documented failure. It sounds unglamorous, but get this wrong and every other device in the design is wasted.

Personally, of the three, I would start with "actually selling." Outside practitioners and a failure-tolerant culture can catch up after students become serious — but nothing starts while the experience remains hypothetical.

Starting at your school: hours, money, and AI, realistically

So what do you do next term? For securing class time, meshing with the period for integrated inquiry is the realistic route. Japan's high school curriculum standards set the period's goals as having students "find questions out of the connection between real society, real life, and themselves, and set their own problems," and cultivating "the attitude of creating new value and working toward a better society"¹³. Find a local problem, shape a solution, try selling it. Entrepreneurship education needs no special slot — it maps directly onto the words of the curriculum standards. SMRJ's program explicitly lists the inquiry period as a permitted setting⁷.

Scale can stay small. It is telling that SMRJ's standard curriculum comes in a five-hour version⁷. Five hours a year fits inside an existing inquiry program within one term. Gauge the response, then expand to the 20- or 30-hour version the following year. On the money side, some schools now receive investments in the hundreds of millions of yen as N-E.X.T. fund adoptees⁵, but simply to start, SMRJ's framework is free and the ambassador dispatch is available on application from the school¹. Honestly, "we can't start because there's no budget" has stopped being a valid excuse.

One more thing worth writing in 2026: AI. Generative AI has dramatically lowered the cost of "building" for high school students. Even a student who has never programmed can shape a working prototype with AI alongside them. I describe the concrete steps in the guide to AI development for high school students, and I believe the fact that ideas no longer have to end as paper posters — that they can be tested as working artifacts — changes the design of entrepreneurship education at the root. For how to bring generative AI into inquiry classes, see also the hands-on article on inquiry learning and generative AI.

At TIMEWELL, through WARP for Schools, we work with schools on generative-AI-powered inquiry and on walking students through building a product with their own hands and putting it into the world. We have been involved in developing more than 500 people and have worked on a partnership program with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (WARP ENTRE). If you want entrepreneurship education at your school to go beyond an annual lecture — all the way to students selling and building — feel free to take a look, even if it starts as an exchange of information.

Summary

• Under MEXT's definition, high school entrepreneurship education is not "how to found a startup" but education in taking on problems and exploring solutions collaboratively. Academic-track schools can do it too
• The national toolkit is in place: the EDGE-PRIME Initiative, ambassador dispatch into schools, and SMRJ's free program. N-E.X.T. fund adoptees now include technical high schools with entrepreneurship plans
• GIFUSHO Inc. at Gifu Commercial High School — a real company with the whole student body as shareholders, running for nearly a decade — stands as the high-water mark of school-led practice
• The shared success patterns are three: actually selling and building, structured contact with outside practitioners, and evaluation designed to tolerate failure
• To start, combine it with the inquiry period at five hours a year. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to "building" as well

I know many teachers brace themselves at the phrase "entrepreneurship education." But lay out the primary sources and both the national definition and the leading schools' practice reduce to a single point: let students attempt something real. Selling a prototype for a hundred yen — that first step could fit into next term's inquiry plan.

---

References

Related Articles

• What Is the N-E.X.T. High School Initiative? Japan's High School Reform, Explained
• What Are the Reform-Leading Schools? The Three Tracks, 75 Adopted Schools, and the Fund
• Inquiry-Based Learning × Generative AI in High School: Practical Steps
• Can High Schoolers Build AI? From Zero Experience to a Working Product
• 50 Inquiry Learning Themes: AI and Frontier Science Edition

Footnotes

1. MEXT, Board of Education Monthly Bulletin, May 2024, Feature 2: Entrepreneurship education for high school students — the spread of the EDGE-PRIME Initiative (in Japanese) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. MEXT, Startup support measures (in Japanese) ↩ ↩²

3. MEXT, EDGE-PRIME Initiative kickoff event, June 3, 2023 (in Japanese) ↩

4. MEXT, EDGE-PRIME Initiative national forum, March 15, 2025 (in Japanese) ↩

5. MEXT, FY2025 High School Education Reform Promotion Project — list of adopted schools, announced June 30, 2026 (in Japanese) ↩ ↩²

6. MEXT and JST, Super Science High School (SSH) support program, FY2026 (in Japanese) ↩

7. SMRJ, FY2025 Entrepreneurship Education Program Support — program guide (in Japanese) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

8. Gifu Commercial High School official site, GIFUSHO Inc. (in Japanese) ↩ ↩²

9. Japan Sales Professionals Association, case study: Gifu Commercial High School (in Japanese) ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. Kyoiku Shimbun, "This is entrepreneurship itself": Yoichi Ito lecture, staged by students (in Japanese) ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Musashino University, EMC Online Seminar for High School Students (in Japanese) ↩ ↩²

12. Aomori Prefectural High School Education Research Association, Career Guidance Division, 48th research conference keynote lecture transcript, FY2024 research bulletin (in Japanese) ↩ ↩² ↩³

13. MEXT, comparison table of high school curriculum standards: period for integrated inquiry (in Japanese) ↩