Abstract:

Universities around the world teach their students digital entrepreneurship to make them more competent and better prepared for the contemporary labor market. Students acquire some levels of digital entrepreneurial competences (DEC) and enter the labor market, but the academic literature offers very limited evidence on the actual and/or perceived levels of DEC the students acquire during the course of their studies. This paper provides an overview of the DEC assessment tool (available at: www.dec-tool.com) which was developed under a research grant for the purpose of assessing the levels of actual and perceived DEC of the university students. The DEC tool was developed using DEC competence model called EmDigital as the conceptual framework, and it covers all four competence areas, 15 sub-competences and 45 specific indicators of EmDigital. The best practice of the relevant competence frameworks (DigComp, EntreComp) was used in developing the tool.The DEC tool had its first application on a sample of university students in Kuwait and Serbia during Spring semester of the academic 2022/2023 and some preliminary results and the characteristics of the study are also presented in this paper.

Keywords:

Digital entrepreneurship, digital entrepreneurial competences, assessment tool, university students.