Developing Entrepreneurship Education: Case of the University of Žilina

The recent growth and development in the curricula and programs devoted to entrepreneurship have been remarkable. Nowadays, there is more than thousand courses all over the world related to entrepreneurship. It is because innovativeness and entrepreneurship are seen as key factors to achieve economic growth. European Union as well as Slovak government recognized this importance of an entrepreneurial education and prepared Action plans to support it. However, a restricting factor is on one hand the implementation of the proposed Action plans and on the other hand the availability of competent individuals to generate innovative ideas, establish and grow their business based on those ideas. Universities can help by increasing competences of young entrepreneurs so they are able to uncover untapped opportunities and establish profiting businesses. This paper describes the development of an entrepreneurship education at the University of Zilina, Slovakia. There was used a case study method for describing experiences with building an entrepreneurship program at the University of Zilina. The case study shows that entrepreneurship education focuses less on traditional lecture-based teaching of individuals and more on experiential learning activities. Learning-by-doing was analysed as best approach to entrepreneurial education in contrary with traditional development of business plans. However, the study also showed that continuous modification of the curriculum is required. Therefore, recommendations how to develop entrepreneurship programs were proposed.