Entrepreneurial competencies education: online possibilities and restrictions

Not only for people owning new firms (entrepreneurs), but also for employees (intrapreneurs), researchers and teachers (academic entrepreneurs) and students entrepreneurial competencies are seen as essential. The concept of competency is placed central in the learning process of students by the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) (Ferreras-Garcia et al., 2021). These competencies increase the possibility of business success, but also rise the employability and performance of employees (Dining 2017).
Competencies are the combined construct of knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) (van Gelderen, 2020). However, there are different views on which competencies are labeled entrepreneurial competencies and if the competencies for the different groups mentioned above are the same (entrepreneurial versus enterprising competencies) (van Gelderen, 2020). Following the three-category framework, there are three kinds of entrepreneurial education: - about entrepreneurship (based on knowledge and theory); - for entrepreneurship (real time situations are simulated acquire intra- and entrepreneurial skills and attitudes); - through entrepreneurship (actual behavior, learning by doing) (Chaker & Jarraya, 2021). Our research will focus on the second kind of education. This study combines knowledge on entrepreneurial competencies and entrepreneurial education and uses the Entrecomp Framework (Bacigalupo et al., 2016). This framework is applicable to all types of entrepreneurship and is therefore context independent. It also describes different levels of proficiency, which shows the potential of this framework to be used in education (Bacigalupo et al., 2016; Morselli & Corenc, 2022). There is limited empirical research into the usefulness of this Entrecomp framework in the entrepreneurial education.
In addition, most research on competence education is focused on the more traditional face-to-face education methods. However during the Covid-19 pandemic, universities had to develop new ways of teaching competencies using online, distance learning approach (Secundo et al. 2021). Several open universities, which are at its core distance education, are struggling to finds ways to incorporate competencies education in their curricula (Chen et al., 2021).
Via an exploratory case study, this research aims to explore which entrepreneurial competencies are explicitly taught in the Dutch universities and which methods are used to teach them? We also explore which of these methods are applicable to use in an activating online educational setting? We examine the curricula of several Dutch universities via a combination of an exploratory survey and in-depth semi-structured interviews. This study contributes by increasing our understanding of the education of entrepreneurial and enterprising competencies in the Dutch university system. It also shows to what extent the Entrecomp framework is used in the educational system, especially in the development towards distance or hybrid education methods.