Kozminski University: Developing Minds for Ambitious Entrepreneurship and Training Teachers at Other Universities

Kozminski University (KU) is a Polish private business and law school established in 1993. It has 5300 students and a leading position in management education in Poland as well as Central and Eastern Europe. KU offers curricular EE for Bachelor, Master and PhD degrees. Most offers are for BA students in Management with a Major in Entrepreneurship. While KU had been offering entrepreneurship courses since its early years, since 2004 the University has embarked on promoting ambitious entrepreneurship among students. This proved to be a fruitful direction but necessitated reshaping minds and attitudes of students and teachers, shifting their focus away from small-scale establishments to business ventures with growth ambitions. Such a shift turned out to be challenging: the pool of students with the right mindset for ambitious entrepreneurship was so far found to be limited at KU itself. However, KU established links with students from other universities in the region and country and from non-business academic disciplines in extra-curricular activities. In these activities it was particularly fruitful for the quality of business projects to mix students from various disciplines like business management, engineering, agriculture and arts. KU also initiated a programme for training entrepreneurship lecturers from other higher education institutions who in turn introduced entrepreneurship courses in 40 non-business universities in Poland. KU’s experiences in EE and lessons learned may be particularly relevant for “catching up” higher education institutions with limited prior experience in teaching entrepreneurship. It may be important for the transferability of such experiences that a substantial part of teaching materials is already available in written form.