Entrepreneurial competencies and intentions among students of technical universities

  • Received March 13, 2021;
    Accepted June 21, 2021;
    Published July 16, 2021
  • Author(s)
  • DOI
    http://dx.doi.org/10.21511/ppm.19(3).2021.02
  • Article Info
    Volume 19 2021, Issue #3, pp. 10-21
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

The study investigates the entrepreneurial competencies and intentions of students. Their formation is a requirement of modern times. The question arises whether students of modern technical universities get entrepreneurial competencies and whether they transform these competencies into their entrepreneurial intentions. More than 3.6 thousand students from six technical universities from Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania were surveyed. Methods of summarizing and grouping data, analysis of the structure of the population and distributions of its elements, evaluation of relationships were used to analyze the results of the survey. It was found that studying at technical universities is not an obstacle to the existence of entrepreneurial intentions among students. The respondents positively assessed their ability to recognize market opportunities for new business (the sum of the shares of positive answers exceeded the sum of the shares of negative answers by 12.4%). A positive generalized assessment was determined when assessing the ability to persuade others to invest in their business, while negative – their ability to write a formal business plan. It is proved that students who highly value their entrepreneurial abilities are much more likely to show the intention to start their own business (р < 0.001). Students’ focus on starting their own business is partly explained by the fact that they connect employment in corporations with a low guarantee of job retention. High positive integrated assessments received the following advantages of own entrepreneurship: prestige (0.302), chance to be realized (0.362), and the ability to create jobs (0.597).

Acknowledgment
The authors wish to thank Denislava Yordanova (Sofia University, Bulgaria), Tatjana Nikitina (Riga Technical University, Latvia), and Daiva Jurevičienė (Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania) for helping to collect data at respective countries.

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    • Figure 1. The predominance of the income of the population with higher education over the income of the population with general secondary education in the OECD, %
    • Figure 2. Distribution of respondents’ answers about self-confidence, %
    • Figure 3. Distribution of respondents’ answers as to whether certain aspects of doing business are attractive, %
    • Table 1. Influence of factors on the intention to create and run own business
    • Table 2. Distribution of respondents’ answers on the comparative characteristics of corporations and family businesses
    • Table A1. A fragment of the survey questionnaire within SEAS – Survey on Entrepreneurial Attitudes of Students
    • Conceptualization
      Julita Wasilczuk
    • Investigation
      Julita Wasilczuk, Nataliya Chukhray , Oleh Karyy
    • Methodology
      Julita Wasilczuk, Nataliya Chukhray , Oleh Karyy , Lіubov Halkiv
    • Project administration
      Julita Wasilczuk, Nataliya Chukhray
    • Supervision
      Julita Wasilczuk, Nataliya Chukhray
    • Writing – review & editing
      Julita Wasilczuk, Nataliya Chukhray
    • Validation
      Nataliya Chukhray , Oleh Karyy
    • Formal Analysis
      Oleh Karyy , Lіubov Halkiv
    • Visualization
      Oleh Karyy , Lіubov Halkiv
    • Writing – original draft
      Oleh Karyy
    • Data curation
      Lіubov Halkiv