Entrepreneurial competencies and intentions among students of technical universities

The study investigates the entrepreneurial competencies and intentions of students. Their formation is a requirement of modern times. The question arises whether students of modern technical universities get entrepreneurial competencies and whether they transform these competencies into their entrepreneurial intentions. More than 3.6 thousand students from six technical universities from Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania were surveyed. Methods of summarizing and grouping data, analysis of the structure of the population and distributions of its elements, evaluation of relationships were used to analyze the results of the survey. It was found that studying at technical universities is not an obstacle to the existence of entrepreneurial intentions among students. The respondents positively assessed their ability to recognize market opportunities for new business (the sum of the shares of positive answers exceeded the sum of the shares of negative answers by 12.4%). A positive generalized assessment was determined when assessing the ability to persuade others to invest in their business, while negative – their ability to write a formal business plan. It is proved that students who highly value their entrepreneurial abilities are much more likely to show the intention to start their own business (р < 0.001). Students’ focus on starting their own business is partly explained by the fact that they connect employment in corporations with a low guarantee of job retention. High positive integrated assessments received the following advantages of own entrepreneurship: prestige (0.302), chance to be realized (0.362), and the ability to create jobs (0.597). Acknowledgment The authors wish to thank Denislava Yordanova (Sofia University, Bulgaria), Tatjana Nikitina (Riga Technical University, Latvia), and Daiva Jurevičienė (Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania) for helping to collect data at respective countries.