Entrepreneurship education: a scorecard approach to assess regional impacts of university programs

摘要

Universities play an important role in the development of regions (Brennan et al., 2004), stemming from their threefold acknowledged mission: Teaching, Research and "Community Engagement" (B-HERT, 2006). Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are equipped with highly qualified human resources and hold a key role in knowledge creation and on the development and evolution of societies (European Union, 2011). To this end an effective incorporation of such knowledge into product development and innovation is crucial (European Union, 2011).Over the past decades knowledge transfer activities have received special attention, notably for their potential for expanding the impact of Universities (Sánchez-Barrioluengo, 2014) through the development of relationships with communities. On this regard, European countries established policies encouraging the transfer of knowledge from university to the European regions (Berbegal-Mirabent et al., 2013).The European Union (2011) has put forward four main areas from which Universities stimulate regional development: enhancing regional innovation through their research activities; promoting enterprise, business development and growth; contributing to the development of regional human capital and skills, and improving social equality through regeneration and cultural development. This paper focuses in the second area, by addressing the university projects aiming the promotion of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is regarded as instrumental in economic growth, and job creation. Entrepreneurial education therefore is included in the range of ways by which Universities are expected to contribute to regional development (Laukkanen, 2000).Education has gain relevance as priority for the European Commission and for European regions from an early stage. In this context, Universities have benefited from the opportunities created by the educational programs fostering the development of a varied set of competences that have been promoted, nurtured by European Education Policies (Cankaya et al., 2015). Currently the Erasmus+ program offers an umbrella for projects aimed at boosting skills and employability. The program supports transnational partnerships among Education, Training, and Youth institutions and organisations to foster cooperation and bridge the worlds of Education and work in order to tackle the skills gaps in Europe. Entrepreneurship education is at the core of these concerns. Erasmus+ promotes the development of entrepreneurial competencies which grant a propitious environment for entrepreneurship (European Commission, 2010; European Commission, 2016), and offers support for the promotion of entrepreneurship education by Universities (Jansen et al., 2015)This paper builds on a scorecard approach to develop a methodology for assessing the regional impacts of university entrepreneurship projects developed under the Erasmus+ program.