Entrepreneurship in Higher Education as a Horizontal Competence

The definition of entrepreneurship usually leads us through business and profit-maximizing techniques and attitudes, usually characterizing individuals and company makers. Recently, the use of the term social entrepreneurship has also been gaining popularity, to describe the entrepreneurial activities with the goal of creating social value (Abu-Saifan, Technol Innov Manag Rev: 22–27, 2012; Shane and Venkataraman, Acad Manag Rev 25: 217–226, 2000). Entrepreneurial activity, in its broad definition, is associated to several factors, both external, such as the economy, employability, market opportunities, and internal, such as the personality characteristics of individuals (Zhao, Seibert, and Lumpkin 2010). In fact, specific traits, such as leadership, optimism, perseverance, passion, resilience, creativity, empathy and others, are more easily found in entrepreneurial individuals. Although not usually considered as explicit competences in the curriculum of higher education degrees, these personality traits can be strengthened, and skills can be learned either directly or by specifying horizontal competences in higher education programmes. The training intentionality of higher education institutions is described in the curricular unit forms, which constitute the study plan of current educational programmes. These are rigorously focused on vertical competences, associated to the scientific area of the programme, but they also include horizontal skills, that contribute to empower the student with a broader set of knowledge and abilities. The teaching and learning methodologies, the content of the curricular units and the learning outcomes all describe the training process, which can be analysed to get an overall idea of the intentionality of entrepreneurship training in current educational degrees.