Social Technologies (Jul 2012)
Entrepreneurship in Cyberspace Research of Mru Management and Administration Students
Abstract
Youth entrepreneurship is one of the European Union’s public policy priorities. Student entrepreneurship in this context is particularly important as academic studies at the university shall develop an entrepreneurial personality.Student entrepreneurship is not widely examined in Lithuanian scholarly work. This phenomenon tends to be analyzed in the context of development of general entrepreneurial skills. There is no prior work on student entrepreneurship in cyberspace—most notably there is no empirical research in this area. This situation emphasizes the need for empirical studies of student entrepreneurship.The purpose of this article is to analyze student entrepreneurship in cyberspace status quo at Mykolas Romeris University (MRU). This research objective was chosen in order to determine the current status and to enable a reference for further research of student entrepreneurship in cyberspace. Additional practical goals are adopted, namely—based on the results of this study, to identify development guidelines for study programs as well as the “Entrepreneurship in Cyberspace” discipline taught in a postgraduate studies at MRU in order to focus them on the needs of future postgraduate students.The research was conducted using a survey method. Before the research three hypotheses were proposed:1) MRU students are more enterprising than the statistical resident of Lithuania;2) student entrepreneurship education in Management and Administration studies is inadequate;3) students need specialized knowledge of entrepreneurship in cyberspace.After the analysis of gathered data from students all three hypotheses were confirmed: students are more entrepreneurial then the general population of Lithuania, entrepreneurial education at the university is insufficient and there is a need among students for specialized knowledge in the field of e-business.Follow-up study of the negative dynamics of student entrepreneurship should be carried out in the future. Research insights about student entrepreneurship in cyberspace support the need of specialized entrepreneurship in cyberspace programs at the university and the necessity to give greater emphasis for it in the public policy. The said program actively contributes to the improvement of student entrepreneurship education and promotion among students. Authors also believe that the findings of this study justify the need to include non-specialized entrepreneurship education into all undergraduate studies.Keywords: entrepreneurship, student entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship in cyberspace.
