ENTREPRENEURIAL EDUCATION ATTITUDES AMONG STUDENTS OF UNIVERSITY OF DUBROVNIK

Abstract

According to Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education is “Content, methods and activities supporting the creation of knowledge, competencies and experiences that make it possible for students to initiate and participate in entrepreneurial value creating processes”. It is obviously that entrepreneurship is making use of the opportunities and ideas and converting them into something, which has financial, cultural or social value. The formation of new ventures is the primary concern of government in both developed and developing countries. The fundamental reason is that small and business promotes job opportunities than can lead to a tremendous contribution to economic development, economic growth, and community welfare. Since it was reported an important role in providing new enterprises, entrepreneurial education has been attracted much interest among scholars. Entrepreneurship education has become a great matter of discuss in entrepreneurship study as its role in driving students' entrepreneurial intentions. Entrepreneurship education covers an individual's ability to stimulate ideas, creativity, and innovation to manage a project toward entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial education is one of the most important aspects of the curriculum in the member states of the European Union, while in Croatia it appears in the National Framework Curriculum as a cross-curricular topic. Some of the social and economic factors that contribute to the development of entrepreneurship education are the acceptance that entrepreneurship can be learned, and therefore taught, and that not only "born" entrepreneurs must be successful. The total number of valid surveys reached 110. Data were collected between 20 October and 15 November, 2020. The survey explored students’ self-perception of their personality traits, their evaluations of social and environmental factors, along with self-assessment of their entrepreneurial intentions. It is the growing interest in entrepreneurship courses by students that led to the goal of this work: to analyse the entrepreneurial education of current undergraduate and graduate students in three departments of the University of Dubrovnik: Department of Business Economics, Department of Maritime and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing. The purpose of the research was to examine the opinion of students about entrepreneurship and their predispositions and desires to become entrepreneurs. The research showed that the share of students who intend to be entrepreneurs is 35%. Students rated their own abilities in terms of relatively high skills and knowledge for running a business and 24% of them had such opinion. Results of survey have established that entrepreneurial education is a very weak component. Only 14% of students had participated in entrepreneurship education programme in a school and 17% had participated in activity which was defined as translating ideas into action and developing their own project. Entrepreneurship should be part of the curriculum in high schools - with this statement 65% of the students agree and 76% of them think that entrepreneurship should be part of the curriculum of the faculty. These values show that students are aware of the importance of entrepreneurial education and interested in entrepreneurship education