"This book is organized around three sections, following a circular approach; it goes from external to internal environment and then back to the external one. It emphasizes the main challenges of the post-industrial society and sheds light on several sources of turbulence from the national, technological, socio-demographical and legal / administrative environment"--
The research aims to determine how the economic and business administration faculties within the European Union member states are contributing to the development of students' entrepreneurial skills. Therefore, a case study strategy is employed which concentrates on the most important business schools from the European Union member states; thus, 267 syllabuses from 21 higher education institutions are identified and analyzed. The results prove that European business schools manage to develop most of the required entrepreneurial skills among their students. Their graduates are both task and people oriented. On the one hand, they value performance, are capable of solving problems and taking calculated risks. On the other hand, they know how to communicate and collaborate within a team. Besides, it may be stated that the analyzed educational programs are combining the "about entrepreneurship" approach with "for entrepreneurship" perspective; they focus on developing cognitive, functional, and behavioral competences by combining lectures with active learning techniques. These actions are influenced by cultural specificity and have an impact on a country's capacity to be a top performer, in terms of entrepreneurship development. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications. On a theoretical level, they extend the literature regarding the development of entrepreneurial skills by providing concrete information about the skills on which the academic curricula focus. On a practical level, they provide valuable insights regarding the skills that the future entrepreneurs will have; these will influence their behavior in a business environment no matter whether they will choose to be the owner of a business or an enterprising employee.
This article aims to analyze how the knowledge economy is measured and how different are the tools developed for this purpose. Since the research focuses on the "how" issues, a qualitative approach is employed. The analysis concentrates on three of the most frequently used tools for measuring a country's progress towards consolidating itself as a knowledge economy, namely: Knowledge Assessment Methodology, developed by World Bank, Lisbon Scorecard, elaborated by World Economic Forum, and Innovation Union Scoreboard, created by the European Union. Nevertheless, Kensho New Economies Composite Index – the newest instrument developed by Kensho Technologies – is brought forward. The results prove that the three most frequently used tools for measuring countries' progress towards consolidating themselves as knowledge economies have the same information capability while the newest tool emphasizes what is usually labelled as "intellectual capital", although it uses the phrase "Knowledge Economy". On the one hand, these results shed light on policy-makers' psychological need of measuring the intangible assets, and transforming the intangible into tangible. On the other hand, they highlight the need for redefining the concept of "knowledge economy" and establishing its pillars.
The research aims to determine how the economic and business administration faculties within the European Union member states are contributing to the development of students' entrepreneurial skills. Therefore, a case study strategy is employed which concentrates on the most important business schools from the European Union member states; thus, 267 syllabuses from 21 higher education institutions are identified and analyzed. The results prove that European business schools manage to develop most of the required entrepreneurial skills among their students. Their graduates are both task and people oriented. On the one hand, they value performance, are capable of solving problems and taking calculated risks. On the other hand, they know how to communicate and collaborate within a team. Besides, it may be stated that the analyzed educational programs are combining the "about entrepreneurship" approach with "for entrepreneurship" perspective; they focus on developing cognitive, functional, and behavioral competences by combining lectures with active learning techniques. These actions are influenced by cultural specificity and have an impact on a country's capacity to be a top performer, in terms of entrepreneurship development. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications. On a theoretical level, they extend the literature regarding the development of entrepreneurial skills by providing concrete information about the skills on which the academic curricula focus. On a practical level, they provide valuable insights regarding the skills that the future entrepreneurs will have; these will influence their behavior in a business environment no matter whether they will choose to be the owner of a business or an enterprising employee.
The research purpose was to determine whether the economics and business administration higher education institutions from the European Union members states are facilitating the development of the future knowledge workers or not. In order to achieve this goal, we employed an exploratory research and we combined a qualitative approach with a quantitative one. We focused on the common courses that are taught in the best European Union higher education institutions, according to the QS World University Rankings. We applied a content analysis to 267 syllabuses that belonged to 21 economics and business administration faculties. Then we employed a logistic regression in order to determine if the teaching methods, used during the bachelor studies, can predict the development of the future knowledge workers. The results have showed that the economics and business administration higher education institutions from the European Union member states tend to respond positively to companies' necessity by developing almost 50% of the "ideal" knowledge worker profile. These findings have implications on both educational and managerial level. At the educational level, it reflects the vulnerable area of the educational process namely, skills development. It seems to be forgotten that education is more than just sharing explicit knowledge; it is about developing the current and the future citizens, building characters and stimulating the need for lifelong learning. At the managerial level, it brings forefront the deficiencies of the future human resources and it indicates the need for adapting the organizational culture and practices. What had been overlooked by the educational system may be complemented by an open organizational culture, an inspirational leadership and an effective coaching process.
