Enhancing Students’ Entrepreneurial Competencies through Extracurricular Activities—A Pragmatic Approach to Sustainability-Oriented Higher Education

Claudia Isac (), Ana Maria Mihaela Iordache (), Lia Baltador, Cristina Coculescu and Dorina Niță
Additional contact information
Claudia Isac: Department of Economics, University of Petroșani, 332006 Petroșani, Romania
Ana Maria Mihaela Iordache: Department of Informatics, Statistics and Mathematics, Romanian–American University, 012101 Bucharest, Romania
Lia Baltador: Department of Management, Marketing and Business Administration, University Lucian Blaga Sibiu, 552304 Sibiu, Romania
Cristina Coculescu: Department of Informatics, Statistics and Mathematics, Romanian–American University, 012101 Bucharest, Romania
Dorina Niță: Department of Economics, University of Petroșani, 332006 Petroșani, Romania

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 11, 1-26

Abstract: Entrepreneurship can provide a creative, disruptive, problem-solving-oriented approach to the current economic, environmental, and social challenges of the world. This article aims to provide an analysis about the way universities can have an impact on developing entrepreneurial competence in students through extracurricular activities. The research relies on a questionnaire survey of students at the University of Petrosani, who participated in a range of entrepreneurial activities both online during the COVID-19 pandemic and face-to-face afterwards. The methodology consisted of applying principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of the indicators, followed by classification of the respondents through cluster analysis and training of a feedforward neural network. After finishing the network-training process, the error was minimized, resulting in three classes of respondents. Furthermore, based on the three classes, follow-up conclusions, policies, and decisions can be issued regarding the perception of entrepreneurship at the societal level, which is beneficial for academia and entrepreneurs, as well as for future research undertaken in this field. The key conclusion of our research is that entrepreneurship education is a real facilitator of the transition to sustainable entrepreneurship. Students perceived meeting successful entrepreneurs as being among the most effective extracurricular activities, assessing online activities as useful, and the field of study proved to be an important factor in their entrepreneurial intention.

Keywords: entrepreneurship education; entrepreneurial competence; entrepreneurial extracurricular activities; business sustainability; entrepreneurial intentions; principal component analysis; cluster analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/11/8708/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/11/8708/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:11:p:8708-:d:1157884

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().