Entrepreneurial Potential in Secondary School Students. An Exploratory Evaluation

Over the last decade, various entrepreneurial school practices have proliferated, including the creation of mini-companies. In the Spanish context, the Empresa Joven Europea (EJE) program has been the most widely employed educative program in this respect. Empresa Joven Europea is an educational program that proposes that secondary education students create and manage their own mini-businesses, thereby taking the legal form of a cooperative society and facilitating the acquisition of all basic educational skills through the cultivation of entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, there is still a gap between the theory and the practice of entrepreneurship education which, together with the conceptual expansion experienced in recent years, increases the need to assess the effectiveness of this type of programs. By means of an explanatory and cross-sectional study, we evaluated the impact of the program on the configuration of the entrepreneurial potential of the participating adolescents ( N = 270). The analysis has been carried out utilizing PLS-SEM with SmartPLS software version 3.3.9 and SPSS version 25. None of the six hypotheses formulated have been confirmed, which means that the desired effects have not been achieved in any of the three variables under study: attitudes, knowledge, and entrepreneurial skills. Such results may be related to aspects of curricular organization, the type of experiences based on cooperatives, a certain structural and conceptual lack of definition of the pedagogical methodology used, and the development of skills linked to identity. Moreover, it is possible that, although it is not evident in the competencies acquired, the program has influenced the apperception of what it means to be an entrepreneur and of the creation of critical awareness, which is associated with entrepreneurial potential. Our study, in addition to opening suggestions for further research along the same lines, presents several implications related to administrative and organizational aspects, to the design of the different pedagogical elements of the programs and to the evaluative criterion adopted.