From Ideation to Implementation: A Framework for Integrating Generative AI into University Entrepreneurship Curricula

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education plays a critical role in developing future business leaders’ capabilities in opportunity recognition, business planning, and strategic decision-making. However, students particularly those without prior business training, often struggle with complex entrepreneurial tasks such as ideation, market analysis, and business-model formulation. These challenges can hinder the development of coherent business plans and reduce students’ confidence in entrepreneurial decision-making. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) present new opportunities to enhance business-planning processes through scalable, adaptive, and personalized support. This paper proposes and evaluates a framework for integrating generative AI into university entrepreneurship curricula through an AI-empowered scaffolding system designed to support business-plan development from ideation to implementation. Grounded in the AI scaffolding design framework proposed by Zhu and Luo (2025), the system guides learners through structured questioning, iterative feedback, and reflective prompts across key business-planning stages, including opportunity identification, market analysis, value proposition development, and business-model design. The framework was piloted with undergraduate students enrolled in an entrepreneurship course. Data were collected from AI system interaction logs, student-developed business plans, and reflective feedback. The findings indicate that generative AI scaffolding enhanced students’ cognitive structuring of business-planning tasks, improved the internal coherence and strategic alignment of business models, and strengthened entrepreneurial self-efficacy. These outcomes are consistent with recent empirical evidence demonstrating the positive effects of generative AI on entrepreneurial intention, learning engagement, and capability development in entrepreneurship education (Park, 2023; Xie & Wang, 2025). This study contributes to the business and management literature by offering a practical framework for embedding generative AI into entrepreneurship and business-planning curricula. It further highlights the role of AI as a strategic pedagogical tool that augments human instruction and experiential learning, supporting the development of future entrepreneurs and managers capable of navigating increasingly complex and technology-driven business environments.