Entrepreneurial Education at Russian Universities: Trends and Challenges of Formation

We are currently witnessing the process of active differentiation among Russian universities. This is drive by two key reasons: growing crisis factors in Russia's socio-economic sphere and the implementation of state programmes to improve universities' competitiveness on a global and a regional scale. The differentiation of universities leads to an overhaul of their strategies, changes to their educational programs and a diversification of their income through various activities on the education and research markets. The development of entrepreneurial education is one of the trends in changes at Russian universities. The paper presents the results of an analysis of Russian universities, which are delivering entrepreneurial education programmes. These universities were analysed across the following sets of indicators: the presence of 'entrepreneurial content' in educational programmes, key strategic documents, the share of university income derived from different types of entrepreneurial activities. All information was gathered through open sources - namely, the universities' websites. Our analysis identified statistically significant correlations between several indicators. Firstly, there is a negative correlation between the proportion of income from paid educational services and science and research activities. Secondly, there is a smaller proportion of graduate entrepreneurial programmes at universities that have a higher overall income, and a higher share of income from scientific activities. Thirdly, the presence of innovation and business-focused content in universities' strategy documents has almost no relationship to universities' actual entrepreneurial activities. Thus, our research showed that the strategic positioning of universities as entrepreneurially focussed is not supported by their actual activities to develop business education and leverage entrepreneurial potential to attract resources to the university. We concluded that the process of differentiating Russian universities and forming a group of entrepreneurial universities is at the seminal stage. Its invigoration requires a modernisation of key institutions (corporate culture, norms and values), the establishment of a special environment and the actualisation of a set of rules to sustain the longevity of entrepreneurial universities.