Entrepreneurship education seeks to provide students with the knowledge, skills and motivation to encourage entrepreneurial success in a variety of settings.

What makes entrepreneurship education distinctive is its focus on realization of opportunity, where management education is focused on the best way to operate existing hierarchies. Both approaches share an interest in achieving "profit" in some form (which in non-profit organizations or government can take the form of increased services or decreased cost or increased responsiveness to the customer/citizen/client).

Opportunities can be realized in several ways. The most popular one is through opening a new organization (e.g starting a new business). Another approach is to promote innovation or introduce new products or services or markets in existing firms. This approach is called corporate entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship, and was made popular by author Gifford Pinchot in his book of the same name. A recent approach involves creating charitable organizations (or portions of existing charities) which are designed to be self-supporting in addition to doing their good works. This is usually called social entrepreneurship or social venturing.