Education and entrepreneurship in the SME segment in economic transformation

Abstract

The issue of business environment for small and medium-sized enterprises is a very actual area of scientific research. Currently, the great importance is given to research people’s personal and knowledge preconditions for conducting business. The aim of this article was to examine the relationship between education of entrepreneurs and several aspects of entrepreneurship in the SME segment. Our own research was conducted in the selected regions of the Czech Republic and Slovakia through a questionnaire survey. A total of 449 owners of small and medium-sized companies have been reached. The sample of respondents was divided into two groups: entrepreneurs with and without a university degree. To reach an above mentioned aim, Pearson statistics for a data count, series of 5000 Monte Carlo replication as well as tools of descriptive statistics have been used. Our results have showed that there are significant differences in the attitudes of these two categories of entrepreneurs in their motives for starting business and the knowledge of the lending criteria of commercial banks. On the other hand, the differences in other fields, such as the evaluation of the commercial banks approach, the change of their companies´ profitability, the ability to manage financial risks and the assessment of the academic knowledge usefulness were not confirmed by our research. © 2015 Centre of Sociological Research. All rights reserved.