Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia: Extracurricular entrepreneurship education activities and start-up coaching within the region

The Technical University of Kosice (TUKE), Slovakia, is located in Kosice, the main city in Eastern Slovakia and the European Capital of Culture 2013. TUKE is a fully-fledged university with a strong technical tradition. It offers curricular entrepreneurship education mainly through its Faculty of Economics, in particular courses in entrepreneurial management and developing entrepreneurial skills. The main emphasis of entrepreneurship education at TUKE is on extra-curricular activities. These include a training programme and a linked start-up weekend for students to develop their own business ideas and start-ups (the AZU initiative), as well as infrastructure to coach individual student start-up projects and regional entrepreneurs (in the Start-up Centre). Within these activities the university integrates regional and national cooperation partners and their knowledge resources in supporting entrepreneurial ventures. This enables a flexible integration of university members with entrepreneurial motivation (staff, students, alumni) as well as a scaling of entrepreneurship education on campus. At the same time it brings about the task of co-ordinating and sustaining single activities over time. Institutionalisation of an infrastructure for extra-curricular entrepreneurship education is currently mainly indirect. It has developed through start-up coaching and training for individual student or staff teams within general technology transfer activities in the university’s start-up centre and the prospective science park.

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  • Case studies
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Country:
Slovakia
Submitted on:
18 Sep 2015