Entrepreneurship researchers have indicated that the process of teaching entrepreneurship does not proceed satisfactorily enough to help enterprising individuals cope effectively in business. Rae 1 suggests that "... the skills traditionally taught in business schools are essential but not sufficient to make a successful entrepreneur". Similarly, Kirby 2 asserts that: …often such programmes equate entrepreneurship with new venture creation or/and small business management and educate “about” entrepreneurship and enterprise rather than educating “for” entrepreneurship […]”.
Some facts from the development of Polish entrepreneurship can confirm this. According to the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development report 3 on the state of the small and medium-sized enterprise sector in Poland in 2011-2012, Poles are generally an enterprising nation. The level of entrepreneurship measured as a proportion of entrepreneurs or those among the employed who are planning to start a business is above the EU average. According to Eurostat data, in Poland there are 1.52 million enterprises, which puts the Polish economy in sixth place in the EU in terms of numbers. This clearly reveals a high propensity to establish businesses. Poland is one of the EU countries with the highest number of newly established enterprises in 2010, ranking second after France. Poland definitely excels in this respect, because "the intention to start your own business" is declared by 22% of adults, in comparison with the EU where there are 13%. At the same time the number of new companies formed over the entire period 2003-2012 was higher than those liquidated.
Nevertheless, although both categories showed an upward trend, the number of liquidated companies increased slightly faster compared to those emerging. According to CSO data 4 three out of four companies in Poland survive the first year of operation (in 2011, the survival rate was 76.6%). In subsequent years, the survival rate clearly falls – to 54% in the second, and 32% in the fifth year of operation. In any case, this is not just a characteristic of Polish entrepreneurship. Sveinn Vidar Gudmundsson and Christian Lechner reported that according to Nobel 5 in general, from 30 to 40% of entrepreneurial firms are complete failures and many are bought out or never bring the expected return on investment, meaning that the real failure rate can be 70 to 80%.
The possible causes of such a situation are interesting. Some indication may be that Poland achieves lower than the EU average results for the index "percentage of adults who agree that school education helped them develop a sense of entrepreneurship" (Poland – 45%, EU – 50%) 6. Perhaps the motivation to start your own business does not go hand in hand with the skills to run it, for which education is at least in part responsible.
In Poland, entrepreneurship in formal education begins in secondary school, starting with ages 14-16 years and continues in high school. According to the Eurydice Report 7, Poland is one of the eight countries that have introduced Entrepreneurship as a compulsory subject. Moreover, in high schools, there is a new complementary additional subject "Economics in practice." At this stage of education, in the reports prepared for the European Commission, Poland is highly evaluated in terms of implementation of the recommendations in the field of Entrepreneurial Education. At an academic level, the situation is already much less optimistic and difficult to assess reliably due to the lack of detailed research in this area. Because education at university level in Poland, as in other European countries is still decentralized, implemented training standards for Economics and Management negligibly reflect the recommendations of the European Commission. 8 Particularly disadvantageous is the fact, that the content of entrepreneurial education has been introduced into the standards of education uneconomically especially in non-business studies according to the report of the European Commission Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General: Entrepreneurship education in non-business schools is almost non-existent, and tends to be viewed as low priority and as a "soft" subject compared with the hard sciences. A recent initiative is the nationwide programme "Dynamic entrepreneurship", geared primarily to students in the non-business field. In Poland, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education has provided financial support to the Dynamic Entrepreneurship Programme to train entrepreneurship lecturers from 20 nonbusiness institutions. " 9
The effects of entrepreneurial education are still rated negatively by business representatives: "I disagree with anyone's view who says that everything is well with the entrepreneurship education in Poland. Truthfully the subject exists, but it is too academic, and most of those who have experienced this, complain of it being over-theoretical and boring. " 10
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