Onur ÖZTÜRK
Uludağ University, Görükle Campus, Bursa, Turkey
Dilek TAŞKIN
Uludağ University, Orhaneli, Bursa, Turkey
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31410/EMAN.2018.1010
2nd International Scientific Conference – EMAN 2018 – Economics and Management: How to Cope With Disrupted Times, Ljubljana – Slovenia, March 22, 2018, CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS published by: Association of Economists and Managers of the Balkans, Belgrade, Serbia; Faculty of Management Koper, Slovenia; Doba Business School – Maribor, Slovenia; Integrated Business Faculty – Skopje, Macedonia; Faculty of Management – Zajecar, Serbia, ISBN 978-86-80194-11-0
Abstract
Higher education is considered to be as one of the most important indicators of economic development of countries. Besides, business education plays a crucial role for the economy of Turkey because it includes various characteristics that are assumed to influence the innovativeness of university students. These characteristics are whether s/he did internship, whether s/he took an entrepreneurship course, whether s/he participated an Erasmus programme, and whether s/he was a community member in University. It is important for decision-makers of education system to know the influence of these characteristics in order to collect the information needed to revise and enhance the current business education system.
The aim of this paper is to measure the innovativeness of the undergraduate students of Business Administration Department (Uludağ University, Bursa), then explore the influence of business education characteristics (whether s/he did internship, whether s/he took an entrepreneurship course, whether s/he participated an Erasmus programme and whether s/he was a community member in University) on the innovativeness of students. The research was conducted on the undergraduate students of Business Administration Department (Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences) of Uludağ University, Turkey. A convenience sampling method was used in the research. Data were collected in the months of October and November of 2017. A total of 207 questionnaires were collected and 11 of them were excluded as they were incomplete. “Innovativeness” was measured by the items based on the related literature (Çolakoğlu & Gözükara, 2016; Ozaralli & Rivenburgh, 2016).
An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare innovativeness score means between “whether s/he did an internship”, “whether s/he took an entrepreneurship course”, “whether s/he participated an Erasmus programme, “whether s/he was a community member in the university”. The findings of the research showed that there were statistically significant differences between the business education system characteristics and innovativeness score. This study has useful implications especially for decision-makers in university education system. In addition, the findings of the study can be used to develop strategies for the local university.
Key words
Higher education, economic development, innovativeness, Erasmus programme.