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Entrepreneurship and particularly women entrepreneurship are widely recognized as growth engine and mean for women empowerment, and investigating its driving forces and determinants is a subject of great interest for creating and implementing public policies focused on fostering women entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, compared to the contribution of women and their businesses to the creation of new jobs and economic growth, the research dedicated to women entrepreneurship is surprisingly poor and rather oriented to specific differences and gender discrimination than to fostering women entrepreneurship. Moreover, in the current economic context, the potential of the women entrepreneurship as an engine to overcome the economic crisis and to alleviate poverty is under-evaluated. There is, therefore, a need for a careful assessment of the women entrepreneurship potential as well as a careful identification of key policy framework conditions aimed at encouraging women entrepreneurship. Starting from the main lines of the literature, the paper investigates the business profile of women entrepreneurs in western Romania, as revealed by an empirical, mainly quantitative, research. The research was undertaken in the frame of a complex educational and research EU-funded project, namely AntrES project. AntrES (Romanian acronym for: The Entrepreneurship and the Equality of Chances. An inter-regional model of Women Entrepreneurial School) was a strategic project co-financed from European structural funds (around 3,000,000 euros), covering six counties in Western Romania, that created an interregional research, education and communication network (6 universities, 60 researchers, 1800 women entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs supported). The AntrES project has been selected from European Commission as success story. The present paper presents the research methodology and the data set generated, and the main findings concerning the business profile of women entrepreneurs in Western Romania. There are approached issues as: fields and sector preferred, age of the firm, ownership issues, occupational status and affiliation of business women, professional level and studies, entrepreneurial history and previous entrepreneurial experiences etc. The paper concludes suggesting gender-sensitive mix policy for encouraging women to exploit the possibilities offered by local and regional potential, based on the business profile of women entrepreneurs in Western Romania identified. Addressing to academics, practitioners and public authorities, the paper is a consistent study-case with considerable implications for further analysis and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All economies have been confronted with the same problems lately. On the one hand they are still recovering from the economic and financial crisis, fact which continues to influence the public and private sector resources and which has a significant impact on further development; on the other hand they are trying to confront the increasing poverty and inequality in the global economy. Sustainable development, equal opportunities are new challenges that need to be approached and solved immediately. The related issue is innovation (Kraemer & Watu, 2010). A growing number of studies and research papers show that economic recovery largely depends on the improvement of the SME sector and on science. Technology and innovation have a significant role in social and economic development. By providing economic competitiveness, the SME sector and innovation have become a priority issue. It is essential to promote policies that sustain innovation and technological transfer in/to the SME sector. Furthermore, these policies should sustain entrepreneurial competitiveness in the region, in industrial branches, in order to increase attractiveness and arrest the attention of investors. All these issue have a significant role in the regional sustainable development. This paper will analyze Romania from this point of view. According to estimates, over 90% of the Romanian SMEs feel the recession. Official data shows that the business environment has deteriorated. In 2009 the decreasing tendency was more accentuated; 10 times more enterprises suspended their activities than in 2008 in the same period. The economic situation of SMEs continued to deteriorate in 2011, the GDP will not have an increasing tendency in 2012 either: it will achieve the same level as in 2008. In Romania the companies concentrate their strategies on the reduced costs of the resources and not on the improvement of productivity. The paper is focused on innovation performances emphasizing the innovative force of SMEs. This study intends to analyze the barriers and challenges for Romania and other East European countries compared to developed economies in line with Europe 2020 strategies. Moreover, it will identify the weak points and local, particular strengths of innovation in the (post)crisis period and will identify the targets for the next period. All the major initiatives in: innovation, education, information society, climate, competitiveness, labor market present challenges for Romania and need short and long term strategies. The scientific approach in this respect is a necessity because it can be observed in publicly available databases that Romania occupies the last places in EU27 in terms of innovation. Targets and tasks for improvement and further development of the innovative SMEs will be analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social change in Romania the last 20 years have brought great changes in labour market structure. These changes are explained both by former communist country characteristics and by the dynamics of the economy. There are systematic differences in social compositions of the country and there are different contexts in which economic activity is developed in various types of countries. Theories of entrepreneurship distinguish between push and pull type of mechanisms explaining self-employment and business start-up. As widely recognized, economic spill-over effects of entrepreneurships are more significant in the case of enterprises that invest serious human, physical and financial capital than in the case of those adopting self-employment as unique solution to grim prospects for employment. That is why we consider as a relevant research topic the description of Romanian population of self-employed individuals starting from specific hypotheses derived from theory. The final aim is to assess the weight of the two types of entrepreneurs, by using recent survey data. The objective of the paper will be fulfilled by using bivariate and multivariate statistical techniques to analysing most recent EVS (European Values Study) data collected in Romania, which contains items identifying self-employed individuals. Subsequently, we will test hypotheses connecting the status of self-employment with level of education, level of parents' education, type of residence, occupation of parents and gender. Our expectations are that, contrary to the ideal-type of daring-educated-upper-class entrepreneur, most of our self-employed individuals are of push-type, being less educated and having a more deprived socio-economic background (with parents with lower status occupations, with lower cultural capital) than active employed citizens. The results of the statistical analyses will be interpreted against the theories in the area and will be related with the economic and socio-demographic context of Romania. In the concluding chapter, the consequences of the findings for Romanian social and economic policies will be examined, and the necessity for the emergence of a solid economy and a large and a powerful middle class, will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last twenty years, universities have been facing a period of profound changes and unprecedented challenges with an increased pressure from different stakeholders requiring universities to play an active role in innovation and entrepreneurial education, both in terms of mindset and practical instruments. At the same time, education seems to be an important tool for stimulating entrepreneurship (Backes-Gellner & Werner, 2007; Harris & Gibson, 2008; Kuratko, 2005; Raposo & Do Paço, 2011) as extensive research provides evidence that there is a positive and robust link between entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurship performance (The Small Business Economy, 2007). The main goal of the research was to explore the way Romanian technical universities are adapting to the new market and educational challenges and are embedding entrepreneurship in their curricular and extracurricular activities to enhance entrepreneurial competences in engineering students. The research questions that guided the study were: 1. How are Romanian technical universities infusing an entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students? 2. Which are the engineering programs that implement most entrepreneurial education courses? 3. What are the most frequent entrepreneurship related extracurricular activities implemented in universities? The research was conducted on 5 major Romanian technical universities. The analysis was conducted using a two-step approach: first, a critical analysis of the literature discussing the concepts of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial university and the role of technical Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in shaping entrepreneurial competencies in engineering students and secondly, an exploratory empirical content analysis of the 5 Romanian technical universities' websites and curricula in order to identify the courses covering topics related to entrepreneurship and the extracurricular activities implemented throughout the university during the 2020- 2021 academic year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of commerce, in the context of the changing framework regarding technologic innovation, the raising quantity and quality of knowledge, the growth of living standards, the competition and the development of the activity realised by economic agents is the subject of important demands that they have to adapt to and for which they have to find solutions. In order to observe the impact of those requirements on companies, we focused our research on the influence of the chain stores expansion - as an expression of internationalisation and expansion of markets, technologies and goods circuits - on producers from Bihor County, Romania. The data base analysed consists of obtained information in the direct and bibliographic research - through applying a questionnaire on 50 goods and services produced by companies that managed or not to sign distribution contracts with the chain stores that have points of sale in Bihor County. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]