ENTREPRENEURSHIP ACTIVITIES AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP COMPETENCIES OF ESTONIAN UNIVERSITY GRADUATES FROM BIO-ECONOMY FIELDS

Abstract

Constant and rapid global economic and social developments and environmental processes create considerable new challenges, but also new opportunities for bio-economy. Entrepreneurs have a crucial role harnessing the new opportunities and addressing the challenges through innovation. The aim of the present paper is to study the entrepreneurship activities and entrepreneurial competencies of Estonian university graduates in the fields connected with bio-economy.  The paper studies the data from a survey of three Estonian universities carried out in 2016 in the program “Systemic Development of Entrepreneurship education throughout all educational levels”.  The analysis focuses on the share of entrepreneurs, assessments of the entrepreneurship competencies among the alumni, who graduated university in the fields of agriculture, forestry, fisheries; life-sciences, and veterinary medicine, and on their comparison with alumni of the other curricula. Chi-square test, ANOVA are used the compare the entrepreneurship activities, competencies of alumni of different curricula. The results show that the graduates’ field of study had significant impact on their entrepreneurship activities after the graduation, and on the attainment of entrepreneurship competencies. A quarter of the agriculture, forestry and fisheries, and a fifth of veterinary alumni were entrepreneurs, although a significantly smaller share of them in comparison with graduates of other fields had received entrepreneurship education during their studies. The share of entrepreneurs was lowest among all the fields of study in case of life-sciences alumni.  The study demonstrates the need to integrate entrepreneurship education into the agricultural and life-sciences education and to address the attainment of key competencies in university’s curricula.

Keywords: entrepreneurship competencies, entrepreneurship education, alumni, university, bio-economy

Article DOI: http://doi.org/10.15544/RD.2017.219