Collaboration and Entrepreneurship Education: Requirements and Perspective

In a collaborative economy, resources are shared and meeting with others produces a collective capital that generates a value. This creates a social exchange space, where members establish a communal identity through their mutual cooperation. For this reason, networking, working in groups and community actions are methods that must be dealt with strategic skills. However, neither the technology nor the technique are enough to make people work together. Therefore, in relation to contemporary theories of human cooperation Aristotle’s concept of philìa becomes important in the modern political context and collaboration and entrepreneurship are really successful only if the debate on competencies is preceded by some prerequisites, which are a conditio sine qua non for ensuring the effectiveness of the technical skills themselves. The road had already been marked in the fourth century BC by the Greek historian Xenophon in his Socratic dialogue Oeconomicus, which strongly draws the essential antecedence of ethics in every speech about management. But how much of this “classical” perspective remained—in terms of awareness and effective use—related to the word “competence”? In 2006 the European Commission started a discussion about the increase of entrepreneurial spirit and several governments aim even more at fostering self-employment and job creation by investing in entrepreneurial education not only at the secondary education level, but also at the higher education level. Therefore, recovering those prerequisites, identified by Xenophon and which involve a sphere of values, allows to embrace and revive a pedagogical perspective centered on the human person.