Abstract:

After overthrowing the communist regime and joining the European Union, Romania kept transitioning towards an advanced economy, continually striving to define a winning long-term development strategy. This paper aims to support the development of such a strategy with the input of higher education students and other highly trained contributors. Our goal was to identify in which way curricular adaptation and intellectual capital development can support the promotion of bio-economy and smart cities, seen as strategic directions meant to yield a tangible increase in quality of life, in close correlation with the population’s expectations. The concept of intellectual capital (IC) is a highly relevant one in the context of the knowledge-based economy, influencing the daily existence of virtually the entire world population. During the last decades, institutional cooperation in the field of education aims at developing a cross-disciplinary network in which the concept of intellectual capital (IC) is aligned with other modern concepts, such as bioeconomy. The evolution from the field of human resources to strategic management reflects the capacity of IC to adjust its profile, in order to yield adaptive elements to support improvement of the quality of life. The evolution of “smart” economy shows societies are becoming more concerned with the optimization of their resource’s usage. Our goal is to improve the understanding of the way in which, in the context of internationalization, higher education can bring a valuable contribution to strengthening the relation between intellectual capital and “smart” economy, seen as resources supporting the strategic development of a nation.The main objectives of the whole teaching assessment are related to the necessity of identifying new trends in the human intellectual capital, to familiarize the students with all these new trends in the economy and technology and to test their receptivity to these new issues, preparing them for the future. The methodology is based on questionnaires after the presentation of the issues. The results are an indicator of the actual situation among Romanian students in technology, about bioeconomy , smart cities, and they will provide new directions for the teaching process.

Keywords:

Intellectual Capital, Higher Education, Smart Economy, Smart City, Quality of Life.