Many founders of small and medium-sized sci-tech companies are sci-tech personnel themselves. They know how to start research and development of the products, but they don't know how to transfer their research and development results into business smoothly or to start a technological enterprise successfully. They haven't received professional entrepreneurship education and training. Start-ups have different characteristics of business development in different stages of their life cycle. The characteristics of business development determine that entrepreneurship education must be carried out hierarchically and evolutionally development in combination with the objective laws of business development and talent training. This study aims at exploring such a new model - project-based learning (PBL) by using entrepreneurial project from the perspective of life cycle theory. The study takes McMaster University and Ryerson University’s entrepreneurship education programs as case study and proposes a "four stages of advanced entrepreneurship education model". The first stage is popularization stage, which means entrepreneurship awareness + confidence cultivation. The second stage is early stage, which means entrepreneurship thinking + idea extraction. The third stage is startup stage, which means entrepreneurship ability + resource integration. The fourth stage is maturity stage, which means entrepreneurship efficiency + strategic planning. At the end of the stages, the learners (entrepreneurs) will commercialize their entrepreneurial products or technologies and eventually go to the market.

Analysis of entrepreneurship education pedagogy in Project-based learning from the perspective of Life cycle theory

[Conference proceedings](https://vbn.aau.dk/en/publications/transforming-pbl-through-hybrid-learning-models-timely-challenges)