Entrepreneurial Competencies and Business Creation. A Research on Policies and Applications

The theme of this study can be justified by the importance that European Union gives in promoting the culture of Entrepreneurship among young people, so that they can deal with more awareness and attitude to future educational and career choices. Set this as a premise, this research aims to give an answer to this question: is the Italian university system really meeting the European expectations in terms of developing sense of initiative and entrepreneurship among Italian university students. This article focuses on describing and analyzing the perception that Italian university students have about entrepreneurship in Higher Education. A quantitative research method was used (a questionnaire structured and applied to a sample of 1918 university students). The most significant results are: 71% of the students do not work; 7% are entrepreneurs and out of 71% students who do not work, 39% never had a work experience. However, most of the respondents show interest to start a business and this perception decreases over the years. Moreover, 58.4% do not believe that the university can help a student find a job and 57.6% believe that the university can help an entrepreneur, but only 12.8% actually. A Supranational Policy of Education indicates that Higher Education should develop competencies in students, especially those ones that are considered as key competencies for a student such as initiative, Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, but how effective these indications are in reality if, as percentages show, only a few students opt for an entrepreneurial career.