Digital Learning for Enhancing Entrepreneurial Skills of Future Engineers

Entrepreneurship activities are known to stimulate economic growth and job creation, therefore, the entrepreneurship education received a considerable attention in the past years. However, most of the existing courses are still created within the business schools, for a limited audience. Often, the opinions and expectations of the students and of the employers are completely ignored. In an attempt to design educational content destined to a much wider audience, we surveyed 86 students in engineering and 24 entrepreneurs and employers about the traits and competencies linked to entrepreneurship they expect to be developed in the tertiary education. Based on the responses to this survey and on the previous research, we argue that the entrepreneurship education should focus on long term results, rather than trying to increase the short term intentions to start a business. Entrepreneurship courses should integrate educational content aimed to develop specific transversal skills usually neglected in formal education. In what concerns the delivery of the educational content, we believe that the best results can be obtained by using a combination of e-learning and practice stages where the students can interact with real-life entrepreneurs.