Fostering Entrepreneurial Mindsets at secondary school

The OSLO conference and agenda on "Entrepreneurship Education in Europe: Fostering Entrepreneurial Mindsets through Education and Learning", highlight the main experiences in Europe and their outcomes regarding the promotion of entrepreneurship in education. Education and training should contribute to encouraging entrepreneurship by fostering the right mindset, providing relevant skills for self employment, raising awareness of career opportunities as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship learning has taken place almost everywhere at secondary school in Europe, but there are no shared entrepreneurship oriented models for different educational levels and systems. Entrepreneurship is defined (European Commission 2002) as a dynamic and social process where individuals, alone or in collaboration, identify opportunities for innovation and act upon these by transforming ideas into practical and targeted activities, whether in a social cultural or economic context therefore, entrepreneurship in education includes economic, social and cultural factors. For this reason it is important to identify educational models to support students in the development both of personal qualities and attitudes and of formal knowledge and skills, and in particular: Personal qualities and attitudes increase the probability of a person recognizing opportunities and acting on them. Knowledge and skills concern what must be done to establish a new enterprise, and how to be successful in developing an idea into a practical, goal-oriented enterprise. Our research focuses on the study of ICT solutions concerning on line entrepreneurial environments based on social networking. Entrepreneurial networking is more than just collaboration since it stimulates the ability to find and create new relationships, the ability and the know how to identify the key competencies that can be useful in developing entrepreneurial mindsets.