Entrepreneurial Competences: Comparing and Contrasting Models and Taxonomies

The emphasis on competencies as capturing key aspects of entrepreneurship is relatively recent and quite distinct from research on entrepreneurial traits or cognitive styles in that competencies represent observable and measurable knowledge, behaviour, attitudes and skills. Many competency taxonomies and models have been proposed by scholars, as frameworks organized into tiers of competencies including descriptions of the activities and behaviours associated with that competency (Chouhan & Srivastava, 2014). However, no comprehensive set of entrepreneurial competencies has emerged from these distinctions and no or little empirical evidence has been provided to validate these categorizations (Morris et al., 2013). This study compares and contrasts three traditional models (Morris et al., 2013, Bartram’s 2005, with the EU Entrepreneurship Competence Framework; EntreComp, Bacigalupo et al., 2016) previously empirically validated by the authors