Intercultural Education for Creative Entrepreneurship

Intercultural education is specific to the multicultural environment in Europe. The European focus on intercultural education is reflected in the documents, reports and measures taken through various financially supported projects. This article presents a research on the characterization of entrepreneurial potential in the case of an intercultural group of Romanian and Serbian trainees who became the target of a cross-border project between Romania and Serbia. The project, of which the designed Creative Entrepreneurship Training Program is part of, is entitled ‘InclusiveArt – Access to Culture for Disadvantaged Children and Youth.’ It implies a dynamic partnership formed by two NGOs (the Intercultural Institute Timisoara and ‘Nevo Parudimos,’ from Resita), one local public authority (the city of Zrenjanin) and one public cultural institution (the Centre for Fine and Applied Arts Terra, Kikinda). The proposed Creative Entrepreneurship Training Program (created in English) plans to help young potential entrepreneurs from the Banat Area in order to develop disadvantaged communities, by establishing commercially viable (self-sustaining) projects/businesses, based on a creative idea, as well as through the provision of a six-day training course for a group of 40 people aged 18 to 35. The training is delivered by a team of academics and training professionals from the Politehnica University Timisoara and the Intercultural Institute Timisoara, both from Romania. The proposed intercultural education program associated with the project implementation aims to the development of entrepreneurship competencies of young people that will be active in creative industries. The potential entrepreneurship characterization considered entrepreneurial traits, such as concerns, motivations, aptitudes and attitudes, as a result of data processing from a self-assessment test. The research results and conclusions support the definition of the structure, content and the didactic strategy adopted for the intercultural education program implementation.