ENTREPRENEURIAL EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT IN EMERGING MARKETS

The rapid technological changes and the development of innovative technologies facilitate the development and growth of a myriad of new ventures around the world each year.

In order to encourage the emergence and the evolution of sound businesses, the education curricula must be updated to include new knowledge related to entrepreneurial business development, especially in higher education institutions (HEI).

Nowadays, due to unprecedented access to information, students have the opportunity to think about how to develop their own businesses easier than in the past and the universities must adapt the body of knowledge that is taught to these new requirements.

The main purpose of students’ entrepreneurial education is to form and develop entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies to facilitate their career orientation and to prepare them to recognize business opportunities in order to initiate and develop their own business.

The paper will present some results of a project dedicated to the formation and development of a student entrepreneurial organization in a Romanian university. The main goal of such organization is to help students to better understand the entrepreneurial eco-system and to be able to become a part of it in the future.

Among project’s main deliverables a curricula for an entrepreneurship module has been developed and an entrepreneurship module was set up. A pilot group of students participated in the first training session using the developed curricula and their results were assessed. The group was deliberately formed from students with various backgrounds (in economics, engineering, sociology and psychology) in order to identify which are their major needs in term of entrepreneurial knowledge, skills and competencies. Based on students’ feedback, the entrepreneurial curriculum has been improved and the entrepreneurial module has been extended to include these requests.