South African Undergraduate Students' Access to Entrepreneurial Education and Its Influence on Career Choice

Entrepreneurship education was introduced in South African schools in 2000 when it was made part of the Economics and Management Science curriculum for Grades 3 to 9, followed by incorporation in the Business Studies curriculum for grades 10 to 12. Problems noted by Shay and Nchu (2015) were that not all schools offered entrepreneurship education. Little is known about post-program effectiveness in actual start-ups and business performance. A study by Peterman and Kennedy (2013) investigating the effects of Young Achievement Australia on a sample of high school students in Australia found that the desirability and feasibility of entrepreneurship after attending the programme had increased, indicating that entrepre

Entrepreneurship Program at Secondary School

The aim of this study is the analysis of the effect that the entrepreneurship activities have in the development of an entrepreneurial profile of the students of a secondary level and their future entrepreneurial intentions. To empirically test the formulated hypothesis, a questionnaire was developed. By the application of methods of factorial analysis and a logistic regression model, it was concluded that variables like the incentive given by school agents, the participation of students in extracurricular activities and the desire to continue studying, influenced the entrepreneurial intentions of the students. Concerning the entrepreneurial profile, it was concluded that the students who have higher capacity of creation and concretization of entrepreneurial projects and a winning will, have a higher propensity to create their own business. This research analysed the impact of entrepreneurship activities on the development of the secondary school students' entrepreneurial profile, and understand whether these same activities influence their future intentions.

Entrepreneurial Education for Immigrants a Tool for Local Development

This chapter talks about the possible contribution that the entrepreneurial education for immigrants can give to local growth. So, the readers will be invited to reflect about the challenges that involves the immigrant entrepreneurship action and your relation with the local development. Next, they will think over the entrepreneurial education paper in this setting, and how your didactic-andragogical assumptions can improve their abilities and the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. So last, a project created by Alto Comissariado Para Migrações (ACM), in Portugal, called Promoção do Empreendedorismo Imigrante (PEI), is described that reinforces the crucial contribution that the entrepreneurial educations for immigrants can give to local development

Impact's Perception of Entrepreneurship Competences Acquisition in Polytechnic High Education Students

The discussion about the evaluation of the teaching of entrepreneurship or training programmes from the perspective of a higher education institution is usually linked to the quantitative impact of entrepreneurship creation and often does not take into account the increase in skills and abilities, or the evolution towards a more entrepreneurial mind-set. In this chapter, the authors propose to analyse the learning perceptions of students who participated in the Poliempreende programme of Portuguese polytechnics. The goal is to see if students feel that their participation was profitable, not only for their personal development, but also for their professional work. Within a perspective of learning in an entrepreneurship, the transformation of entrepreneurs' experiences into knowledge can influence the relationship between their professional experience and the development of their wisdom about entrepreneurship. Thus, it is proposed to implement the evaluation of the impact of the perception of these students through the evaluation model of Kirkpatrick.

Acquiring Competencies Through Teamwork Activity

Employability is a crucial aspect of the European Higher Education Area. Thus, the overriding aim of curricula is the integration of knowledge (specific competencies) and personal/ occupational skills (generic/ transversal competencies). The teamwork competency is important in achieving the goal of graduate employability. Applied to the case of the financial management subject at the University of Extremadura (Spain), this study analyses the assessments of a group of students and a group of teachers of the use of teamwork activity in the acquisition of knowledge and generic competencies. The findings, both for students and teachers, lead to recommend that the centres quality committees advise the use of teamwork in subjects which do not yet apply this learning methodology.

Entrepreneurship Accelerator Programs

Entrepreneurship is considered a key phenomenon today in economic and social development. Nevertheless, most start-ups fail a few years after being launched. In order to improve the success of start-ups, several initiatives, such as entrepreneurship accelerator programs, are being strongly supported both by public and private organizations. The underlying question is if those initiatives are really contributing for start-ups' success, and how. This exploratory study aims at understanding the impact that an accelerator program has on the different elements that in the literature were considered crucial for a company's success, mainly the founders' characteristics, strategy and resources.

Poliempreende Project

The Portuguese polytechnic high education network has developed a reference project with an institutional cooperation and entrepreneurship education methodology of development and implementation, for more than 15 years now. The concern of promoting and empowering entrepreneurs as a response to the paradigm shift of “a job for life” gave form to the Poliempreende Project which is a teaching design method, enterprise-oriented, to promote and develop new business projects. The main goal is to present and demonstrate the impact of the Poliempreende project in the students and in their business creation process. In order to do that, the authors will follow a case study methodology to analyse how and why this entrepreneurship education methodology is implemented and how it has achieved success. This will be done by integrating the project within the European entrepreneurship education policies, showing how it addresses and follows the European guidelines for entrepreneurship competencies development, and supports innovation and business projects can be turned into new enterprises in a sustainable way.

The Entrepreneurial Intention in University Level Students

Universities impact in the entrepreneurship ecosystem, they emanate a large number of talents, using their resources to support entrepreneurship. From this situation, arrives the importance of generating and validating measurement instruments to contribute to the identification of level of entrepreneurial intention with which students, of higher education level, have. The Exploratory Factor Analysis technique, uses the Varimax Orthogonal Rotation method, with principal component extraction factors, with a sample of 235 students in public universities of the state of Guanajuato in Mexico, considering 6 dimensions as variables. The results of this research consider as relevant only 3 dimensions from the 6 studied, considering that the entrepreneurial intention in the higher education student is a product of creativity, innovation and need for achievement. While the three dimensions: self-esteem, assumption of risk and problem solving, does not reach a relevant importance; showing a robust instrument for the Mexican context.

Does Entrepreneurship and Innovative Education Matter to Increase Employability Skills?

The present study proposes a framework of key skills to improve the HEIs current curricula through entrepreneurship and innovative education. The approach is based on a questionnaire applied to key stakeholders, students (from economics, business and engineering subject field of studies) and academics, from five European countries. The results allow to identify the graduates' skills shortages and the best covered skills in current curricula. Those skills are in accordance with the 21st century skills and constitute the foundation of the proposed framework that suggests that this mix of skills should be integrated and implemented into the curricula degrees of HEIs, through a group of innovative and entrepreneurship education initiatives to promote graduates' employability.

Entrepreneurship Education With Preservice Teachers

The theme of entrepreneurship has been pointed out a few years ago, by international institutions, as being essential to be integrated into the school, to empower future citizens to become agents of change and improvement of living conditions in their communities. Widely understood as the ability to turn ideas into action, their integration must be done early in school and requires a change in the learning environment. This should focus on the student who has been given an essential and active role in learning. The development of entrepreneurial skills, called soft skills, slow to develop and essential to every citizen, should be done as soon as possible. This chapter aims to disseminate a methodology of entrepreneurial education applied to children from 3 to 12 years old and exemplify with projects developed in kindergarten contexts.