Application of Metaverse Technology in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Review

A systematic review of the application of metaverse technology in entrepreneurship education can help relevant teaching and research personnel better grasp the current development trends, and better utilize cutting-edge technologies to support the development of entrepreneurship education in teaching and practice. Therefore, this review aims to review the latest trends and research with the question "What issues can metaverse technology be applied in entrepreneurship education?". This system review adopts Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses (PRISMA) , and collects data based on two core journal databases, Scopus and Web of Science, while using Note Express and Mendeley as supporting databases. A total of 27 articles were identified through a systematic search of ("metaverse*" OR "cyberspace*" OR "metaverse technology*") AND ("entrepreneurship education*" OR "enterprise education*" OR "entrepreneurial education*"). The results shown that metaverse related technologies are changing entrepreneurial intentions, make it easier for entrepreneurs to access entrepreneurial resources, and improving the efficiency of entrepreneurship education. The exploration of these issues also lays the foundation for subsequent researchers to study how to apply cutting-edge technologies to entrepreneurship education.


Introduction
Entrepreneurship education is widely carried out in various countries, The academic community has conducted extensive research on entrepreneurship education, and the related research results has shown exponential growth (Tiberius & Weyland, 2023).Although schools can provide various forms of courses to help students master all the knowledge and skills necessary for entrepreneurship, an inexperienced entrepreneur is still difficult to succeed.Entrepreneurship experience is very important for entrepreneurs.Many successful entrepreneurs achieve success after experiencing multiple entrepreneurial experiences.For example, Jack Ma, the founder of the famous Alibaba company, after several failed startups experience, founded Alibaba and achieved success.However, the reality is that many people may only have one entrepreneurial opportunity.Because once entrepreneurs start a business, they always investing all of their time, energy, and money.However, once the Vol 13, Issue 1, (2024) E-ISSN: 2226-6348 startup fails, it means that the entrepreneur will not have enough funds to start another new business for a long time.The metaverse expands the physical world by utilizing augmented reality Lim et al (2024) and virtual reality Benvegnù et al (2023) technologies.Virtual environments and immersive games (such as VRChat, Roblox, Fortnite, and Second Life) are described as the predecessors of the metaverse (Dwivedi et al., 2022).All these immersive games will bring participants a real experience, enhancing and changing their cognition in the real physical world.And these experiences can also be entrepreneurial experiences that entrepreneurs must possess.Therefore, this systematic review aims to review the latest trend and research with the question as follow: What problems in entrepreneurship education can applying metaverse technology?

Metaverse Technology
In 1982, science fiction writer William Gibson pioneered the concept of cyberspace in his short story "Holographic Rose Fragments".In 1992, Neil Stephenson proposed the concept of the "metaverse" in his science fiction novel "Avalanche".Whether it's the Metaverse in the novel "Avalanche" or the Oasis in the movie "Number One Player", these virtual spaces used to carry the main plot of the story all have a common name, which is Cyberspace.When Roblox was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the metaverse was included in the prospectus.So now Metaverse has become synonymous with Cyberspace.Most of the time, these two words have the same meaning.Because the term metaverse does not specifically refer to specific technologies, but rather to the widespread transformation of the way humans interact with technology (Whitehouse, 2008).Metaverse is a virtual environment where users have strong connections with the physical world through their avatars (Aung et al., 2024).Boston Consulting Group (BCG) defines the metaverse as the following three types of technologies in its "Metaverse Enterprise Hitchhiking Guide" First category is metaverse worlds (M-worlds) (Hayashi et al., 2023); Second category is augmented reality (AR) Koumpouros (2024), virtual reality (VR) (van der Meer et al., 2023) and mixed reality (MR) (Campbell et al., 2016); Third category is Web3 (Seddon et al., 2023) and virtual assets (Zhang et al., 2022).These technologies are widely applied in various industries, especially in the education sector.Emerging technologies such as Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) and Metaverse have pointed out new directions for the future of education (Wei & Yuan, 2023).For example, the combination of virtual reality and interactive technology can play an important role in promoting campus culture by providing campus cultural information in the metaverse, allowing users and various social media platforms to interact (Listyaningsih et al., 2023).

Entrepreneurship Education
Entrepreneurship education can be narrowly defined as supporting students to become entrepreneurs themselves.But broad definition of entrepreneurship education is to help students acquire entrepreneurial abilities, so that in their future work and life, they can create value for the companies or organizations, as well as engage in entrepreneurial activities and achieve success on their own (Kikas, 2019).Entrepreneurship education aims to cultivate talents with basic entrepreneurial qualities and innovative personalities (Jia et al., 2022).It not only aims to cultivate the entrepreneurial awareness, spirit, and ability of students in school, but also targets those who plan to start businesses and have already started businesses throughout society.Entrepreneurship education is a phased and hierarchical education that cultivates innovative thinking and enhances entrepreneurial abilities.Entrepreneurship education is essentially a practical education.Entrepreneurship ability is one of the key factors in enhancing a country's competitiveness (Chou et al., 2023).Entrepreneurship education is crucial for cultivating students' ability to start up and successfully operate a new businesses (Amani et al., 2024).It is precisely because entrepreneurship education is so important, and at the same time, the updates and iterations of metaverse technology are also rapidly changing.Therefore, a systematic review of the application of metaverse technology in entrepreneurship education can help relevant teaching and research personnel better grasp the current development trends, and better utilize cutting-edge technologies to support the development of entrepreneurship education in teaching and practice.

Methods
According to the method of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses(PRISMA), following the four basic steps of identification, screening, qualification, and inclusion , as shown in Figure 1.The specific content of the entire operation processes are as follows.

Identification
The first step in the systematic review covers the Identification process as reported in the PRISMA guidelines (John & Yunus, 2021).All retrieved literature comes from the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases.The key terms included in this system review have been carefully constructed to reflect the structure under review.Words related to Metaverse and Entrepreneurship Education(EE) were included.During the search process, due to the limited number of literature retrieved from the WoS database, the scope of the search was increased.The search strings used for each database in this study are shown in Table 1.

Screening
After searching, a total of 277 articles were found from two databases.First, remove the duplicate 24 articles.Then, after excluding review articles, book chapters, conference proceedings, articles not written in English, and articles where the full text cannot be found, there are still 93 articles left.T Table 2 shows the inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Table 2 Inclusion and exclusion criteria. Inclusion Criteria Exclusion Criteria Articles from journals
Excluded due to systematic literature review, book chapters, conference proceeding Articles written in English Articles not written in English Full text articles accessed Not related to entrepreneurship education and Metaverse technology After a quick reading of these articles, 66 articles that were clearly unrelated to entrepreneurship education and the metaverse were excluded, leaving 27 articles on the application of metaverse technology in entrepreneurship education.Conference proceedings and book chapters are excluded because they were not complete enough (Santhanasamy C, 2022).

Included
After careful selection and organization, there are a total of 27 articles related to metaverse and entrepreneurship education.Table 3 present in details about the research objectives and results of these articles.

Results
Through the search string, 277 articles were retrieved, and it was found that although there was no time limit set for the search, there were very few literature related to the metaverse and entrepreneurship education before 2019.However, starting from 2021, there has been a rapid growth trend in literature related to the metaverse and entrepreneurship education.
Figure 2. literature by year Among the 27 selected articles, over 60% were published in 2023.This indicates that the application of the metaverse in the field of education, especially in entrepreneurship education, is just beginning to take off.How to apply metaverse related technologies in entrepreneurship education is becoming a hot topic in current research.

The impact on entrepreneurs: Changing entrepreneurial intentions
Metaverse technology has a significant impact on early entrepreneurship education and is of great help in successfully incubating entrepreneurial projects.Schools can use games for entrepreneurship education (Park & Kim, 2023).It can solve the contradiction between the personalized needs of each entrepreneur and the high cost of entrepreneurship education (Liu, 2023).Metaverse technology will affect the entrepreneurial willingness of entrepreneurs (El-Gohary et al., 2023).Virtual social platforms make it easier for entrepreneurs to find likeminded individuals and be influenced by others.This can not only help entrepreneurs obtain more resources, but also change their entrepreneurial intentions (Bernardino et al., 2023).The development of metaverse technology helps to eliminate gender differences in the field of entrepreneurship (Kuschel et al., 2020).More women can be involved in entrepreneurship (Gutiérrez-Esteban et al., 2021).

The impact on entrepreneurial resources: Easier access to entrepreneurial resources
Research on social entrepreneurship emphasizes the importance of resources.Establishing a new social platform through virtual networks can attract more entrepreneurial resources for entrepreneurs (Bernardino et al., 2023).More entrepreneurial resources will greatly improve the success rate of entrepreneurship.The metaverse has also influenced digital entrepreneurship (Calandra et al., 2023).Digital learning ability refers to the ability to use and learn information technology (Yan & Li, 2023).Improving students' knowledge of information technology and enhancing their digital capabilities is an important factor in enhancing their trend towards building digital enterprises (Mir et al., 2023).As the threshold for using digital technology in innovative services decreases (Neff et al., 2024) , more and more entrepreneurs will find it easier to access entrepreneurial resources through data technology.
The impact on educators: Improving the efficiency of entrepreneurship education New technologies have brought challenges to educators (Ratten & Jones, 2023).Digital technology has become a part of the learning experience, and these technologies are shaping a new era for educators (Ratten, 2023).Although the metaverse promotes interaction between individuals (such as learners), there is a scale of knowledge on what influences its acceptance and use in higher educational institutions (HEIs), specifically in developing countries (Alkhwaldi, 2023).Virtual technology has enabled large-scale popularization of entrepreneurship education, significantly increasing entrepreneurial activity (Pan, 2022).Universities can achieve personalized learning trajectories, improve accessibility, economic efficiency, and overall operational performance (George & Wooden, 2023).The use of the metaverse can enable students to acquire true skills (Qiu et al., 2023).At the same time, teachers are increasingly in need of sufficient digital abilities to use and teach artificial intelligence in teaching environments (Ng et al., 2023).

Discussion
In the past five years, research literature on innovation and entrepreneurship has exploded worldwide.Starting from 2022, papers on the metaverse and its related technologies have grown rapidly, becoming a new hot topic in the field of entrepreneurship education research.The metaverse has great potential for development, augmented reality and virtual reality technologies can be used to expand the existing physical world.Through avatars and holograms, enable seamless interaction between users in both real and simulated environment (Dwivedi et al., 2022).This greatly expands people's activity space and reorganizes social resources in a new way.Compared to offline social capital, online social capital has a greater impact on entrepreneurial attitudes, and online social capital has a greater impact on entrepreneurial willingness than offline social capital (Fernández et al., 2021).The accumulation of social capital requires time and experience.The virtual world constructed by the metaverse can break the influence of geographical factors in the real world, reduce the cost of interpersonal communication, and make it easier to establish connections with different types of people, thereby accumulating the social capital of entrepreneurs.At the same time, it can also effectively compensate for the problem of insufficient social capital of young entrepreneurs.This is very helpful for governments around the world to promote entrepreneurship in a more effective way (Tsaknis et al., 2024).The development of new technologies related to the metaverse has also put forward new requirements for entrepreneurship educators.The way educators view their role relative to students is crucial (Wraae et al., 2022), and the widespread application of metaverse related technologies is constantly reshaping the role of educators (Iipinge & Shimpanda, 2022).The popularity of the metaverse is not only a challenge for entrepreneurs, but also a huge challenge for entrepreneurship educators.

Conclusions
In conclusion, this systematic review has reviewed papers related to Application of Metaverse Technology in Entrepreneurship Education.The entire article revolves around the question " What problems in entrepreneurship education can applying metaverse technology?" and ultimately answers this question.The main findings highlight three aspects of the trends in entrepreneurship education, as follows First, Metaverse technology is an important factor affecting the entrepreneurial willingness of entrepreneurs.Most studies have shown that metaverse related technologies can enhance the entrepreneurial willingness of entrepreneurs, thereby benefiting the policy goals of encouraging entrepreneurship in various countries.Second, Metaverse related technologies have broken many resource limitations in the original physical world, making it easier for entrepreneurs to access various resources.Meanwhile, metaverse related technologies are beneficial for improving entrepreneurial efficiency, reducing entrepreneurial costs, and helping entrepreneurs achieve higher success rates.Third, The popularity of the metaverse has also posed new challenges to entrepreneurship educators.Mastering more advanced technologies and applying them to the teaching process is a major challenge currently faced by entrepreneurship educators and a key issue that must be addressed.Based on the results, This review explores the application of metaverse related technologies to solve the problems faced by entrepreneurs, the problem of entrepreneurial resources, and the problems faced by entrepreneurial educators.This also lays the foundation for subsequent researchers to study how to apply cutting-edge technologies in entrepreneurship education.

Table 1
Search string used in this study.