Entrepreneurship education impact on student attitudes

Abstract

Entrepreneurship and new business operations are potentials of economic development and growth in the modern society. The high quality of education in innovative fields provides a great opportunity for the establishment of new entrepreneurship. Through entrepreneurship education, young people, learn organizational skills, including time management, leadership development and interpersonal skills. Often the young entrepreneur faces barrier that influences and prevents the completion of the implementation. The current paper concerns the study of students' entrepreneurship activity and how this affected by various barriers and success factors. The survey was conducted among 169 students of University of Thessaly that attended entrepreneurship education program. The questionnaire that was used was based on the adapted instrument of Karhunen, Ledyaeva, Gustafsson-Pesonen, Mochnikova, and Vasilenko (2008). The questionnaire consisted of four groups of questions. All questions were answered with the use of a 5 point Likert type scale. Paired samples tests indicated significant differences before and after attending entrepreneurship class in both extrinsic and intrinsic barriers and also in success factors rates and future carrier plans. Despite these obstacles, however, encouraging students can be a way to overcome these obstacles and get into the business in the path of growth and innovation. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.