ICT-BASED STUDENT ENTREPRENEURIAL PROJECTS ANALYSIS OF SYSTEMATIC SUPPORT AND EVALUATION OF STUDENT INTEREST

Abstract

In today’s modern world, more than ever before, students are faced with entrepreneurship based on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) as a reasonable and justified career choice. Whether their career choice would be successful or not depends a lot on the level of system support through entrepreneurial ecosystem during their education.

The main objective of this paper is to present the current assessment, indicate the problems and possible solutions regarding the entrepreneurial infrastructure, culture and potential of higher education institutions in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. To achieve this, we have researched the level of the system support to students for development and launch of their ICT based start-ups during and after their university education respecting different educational profiles and demographic characteristics.

The research covers the sample of 436 students from seven higher education institutions in Banja Luka at their bachelor studies and includes focus groups, survey, descriptive and inferential statistical methods.

We have found significant discrepancy between university ICT programs and infrastructure and student needs. For instance, a quite large number of students interested in ICT industry attended some kind of informal education from this domain and at the same time they were unaware that those and similar programs were freely available at their universities. In this paper we have identified those and similar gaps and compared our research results with similar results in other countries.