This homepage presents the results of the Survey on Entrepreneurship in Higher Education Institutions in Europe. The survey was carried out by NIRAS Consultants, FORA and Econ Pöyry for DG Enterprise and Industry in 2008.

The underlying assumption of the study is that entrepreneurship education can foster entrepreneurial mindsets, attitudes and skills. In the study, entrepreneurship education is defined to cover a range of aspects such as idea generation, start-up, growth and innovation. To foster the right mindset among students and providing them with relevant entrepreneurial skills, the higher education institutions need to be entrepreneurial themselves. There is not one path to become an entrepreneurial institution – the institutions can take a number of actions. To capture and structure the wide range of actions that institutions take, the consortium developed a framework consisting of six dimensions, each based on between three to five indicators. Each indicator is made up of answers to between one and five questions. The result of this benchmark is presented below. The framework is described in further detail in the report.

The fundamental principle behind benchmarking is that it investigates the link between performance and framework conditions (the actions of the higher institutions that determine performance). Here, the performance index as well as the framework index are based on the model presented earlier that identified the most important elements fostering and supporting entrepreneurship education (input) and the output of the institutions’ entrepreneurial efforts (entrepreneurial students and knowledge transfer).

If you are interested in exploring the results of the benchmark, press here

 If your institution is one of the 200 institutions that completed the long questionnaire, you can access the on-line benchmark instrument, and see how your institution scores on the six dimensions, and the underlying sub-dimensions compared to the other European higher education institutions in the benchmark.

If that is the case, the e-mail you have received included a password, which you should enter in the login form to the left.

If your institution did not complete the questionnaire, it is not possible to do the benchmarking. Instead, you will have access to the general results. This will allow you to see how the answers to the questions are distributed on types of institution, geographically in the EU15 and EU>15, and how long they have been involved in entrepreneurship education.