Coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the UOC, the following article aims to review the main transformations that the basic areas of business have undergone over the past two and a half decades. For this, we have enjoyed the participation of five female and five male professors in the studies of economy and business, who have given us some broad strokes on some of the main changes during this period and the challenges still to come. These topics are: leadership, decision-making, internationalization, digitalization, strategy, adaptation to change, ethics, corporate social responsibility, diversity, inclusion, business modal innovation, and finance.
Social entrepreneurship has existed for as long as there have been social problems needing responses and solutions. In recent years, new forms of business have been developed that respond to social and environmental challenges, and which combine aspects of non-profit organizations with others of for-profit companies. In this article we start by defining social entrepreneurship, which has specific characteristics and needs that are distinct from those of conventional entrepreneurship. This difference has enabled the development of a financing market specific to this field, which attempts to provide suitable responses to the different types of organizations operating therein. We then go on to look at the financing models available to social initiatives and the cases and situations that make some more appropriate than others.
Entrepreneurship has been from several years on the political agenda in many countries, since it is considered one of the main engines to promote, among others, innovation, competitiveness and job creation. In this sense, both public and private institutions offer training programs to increase entrepreneurship in general and specific programs for entrepreneurial population.
This article is a brief review of the current state of entrepreneurship education, with special emphasis on the situation of Spain compared to Europe. In order to achieve this goal and based on secondary sources, we present data regarding the percentage of training in entrepreneurship, the type of training and the levels of education in which this training is done. Then, we analyze the specific situation at university and the role of distance education.
The main results show that entrepreneurship training is widespread in both the general population and in the entrepreneurial population. Moreover, there is an overlap between the formal and informal training systems. Regarding the level of education, the school level and post-school level also overlap. Finally, we point out the heterogeneity of methodological approaches and content att universitiy level that influence the perceived low quality of the university and the concentration of training in economics and business faculties and business schools.
This article concludes that efforts must be made to adapt methodologies to a competencies approach in training programs, specifically at college level and expand education and training in entrepreneurship beyond the disciplines of Economics and Management. In this sense, distance education can help in increasing this training for other groups who so far are not sufficiently covered and contribute to increase the quality of training.