Abstract:

The article is based on the stringent necessity derived from the national concern toward investing more in education and lifelong learning activities in hope that some social disparities will be reduced. The application of knowledge – by means of entrepreneurship and innovation, research and development, software and design, education and developing computer – related skills – is now recognized to be one of the key sources of growth in the global economy and of increased social coeherency. To enhance productivity growth, to maintain competitiveness and address disparities and economic – societal mismatches, countries such as Romania should imvest more and with higher efficiency and efficacy in building human capital in a more direct way by higher education institutions. Especially for countries with medium score on the scale given by the Human Development Index, the quality of education needs improvement in order to foreseen on the long turn high quality of the output indicators of innovation (innovative applications, indicators of intellectual property). Every goverment/central authority is concerned with finding the right tools to press on the formal education system in choosing the appropriate mechanism for conveying to the young people, future employees and employers such the entrepreneurial culture so, on long term they could reconfigure the traditional old-fashion links among academia, research institutes and industry companies, for both private and state-owned enterprises.
The article’s intention is to provide a way to assess the correlation between developing entrepreneurial spirit in the young generations through the formal education system and the highly competitive results from domestic innovation process. It is proposed a benchmarking exercise in which several variables (identified by the means of empirical evidence and the availability of statistical data) are studies into econometric models (of multiple regression type) to test the impact effects on the explained variables described as output innovation indicators. The research idea focuses on the various indicators related to the enterprise/domestic level, variables concerning public science/higher education, and industry/government areas as the main dimensions to trigger the golden ‘knowledge triangle’ of education, research and innovation in gaining revelance within nowadays Romanian economy and society. Based on the sample composed on several countries within the European Union, the following objectives were followed: investigating ways in which entrepreneurship related activities held developing closer between academia and industry, investigating about how entrepreneurial learning can promote the innovation culture. The constructed models based on some hypothesis are tested on the cross-country samples; the econometric models are run in the linear and logarithmic forms, then using two dummy variables – for the country’s level for development and the registered lags in the influencing mechanism. The conclusions reached give information about the most influencing variables and a prioritization procedure for founding long-term financing strategies is proposed according to the previously obtained results.