The “Education, Entrepreneurship and Cultural Heritage” Initiative: Eleusis 2023 European Capital of Culture

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article has undergone significant enhancements since its initial submission, resulting in a more comprehensive and lucid account of a developing entrepreneurial education program in Greece.

While 45 interviews may be sufficient for a qualitative study, I believe that presenting the results solely in terms of descriptive statistics is not high effective for a couple of reasons.

1. The questionnaire appears to prompt the respondents to submit a "measure" or assessment of several issues, however the resulting report only includes a limited number of these assessments. Please compare the provided findings with the information requested in the questionnaire. Can authors enhance the depiction of findings?

2. The findings may have been presented as direct quotations from the interviewees' open responses. For instance, it would have been intriguing to comprehend the reasons behind their satisfaction with the program and how they perceive the value of the acquired skills in terms of employability or entrepreneurial aspirations.

Significantly, the authors assert that they are investigating the students' impressions; nevertheless, the interviews are actually focused on teachers. Therefore, the phenomenon being studied can only be witnessed indirectly through the accounts provided by the educators. This methodological choice could be questionable and must be explicitly declared and supported.

Ultimately, it is crucial to compare the results of this study with those of other relevant empirical research conducted in different settings. This will allow the scientific significance of the paper to become evident and be properly contextualized. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The manuscript contains new sections that have been marked in red by the authors. These sections require editing due to minor English language issues. 

Author Response

Comments 1: 

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article has undergone significant enhancements since its initial submission, resulting in a more comprehensive and lucid account of a developing entrepreneurial education program in Greece.

While 45 interviews may be sufficient for a qualitative study, I believe that presenting the results solely in terms of descriptive statistics is not high effective for a couple of reasons.

1. The questionnaire appears to prompt the respondents to submit a "measure" or assessment of several issues, however the resulting report only includes a limited number of these assessments. Please compare the provided findings with the information requested in the questionnaire. Can authors enhance the depiction of findings?

2. The findings may have been presented as direct quotations from the interviewees' open responses. For instance, it would have been intriguing to comprehend the reasons behind their satisfaction with the program and how they perceive the value of the acquired skills in terms of employability or entrepreneurial aspirations.

Significantly, the authors assert that they are investigating the students' impressions; nevertheless, the interviews are actually focused on teachers. Therefore, the phenomenon being studied can only be witnessed indirectly through the accounts provided by the educators. This methodological choice could be questionable and must be explicitly declared and supported.

Ultimately, it is crucial to compare the results of this study with those of other relevant empirical research conducted in different settings. This will allow the scientific significance of the paper to become evident and be properly contextualized. 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The manuscript contains new sections that have been marked in red by the authors. These sections require editing due to minor English language issues.

 

Response 1: 

Distinguished Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your feedback. To address the issues that you are mentioning, we have done the following:

1. We have provided deeper explanations about the interviewees' responses in our 'Methodology' section, as our report is a result of analysing and clustering the interviewees' answers.
2. The topic of employability is intriguing. It would be an interesting question, and we added it to the limitations of our study.
3. The role of the participants was complicated in the initial manuscript. We revised the English language in the article. We hope it is more direct now that the study focuses on university graduates who, as students, had been Teacher Education Program trainees and participated in the entrepreneurship program, and their opinions as aspiring teachers about the impact of such programs on themselves and school students.
4. We added referred literature in the discussion of our study. We hope our article's importance and contribution will be more explicit now.
5. Our whole manuscript has undergone extensive English revisions to improve clarity and readability.

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The primary focus of this research is to explore in which ways educators can blend together cultural heritage, education, and entrepreneurship. This is a unique topic of interest, and the article provides a significant input in this field, filling a gap for the case of Elefsina -- a historical but also degraded region of modern Greece. Although there are many other publications on the broader theme of entrepreneurship, the research adds two important aspects that enhance this idea, namely "cultural heritage" and "school education". The authors might consider elaborating their methodological context to enhance its integration with the preceding sections of the article. The conclusions align with the evidence and effectively address the main question posed, indicating that the study has successfully achieved its research objectives.

The article being evaluated is original and adeptly interacts with current scholarship, striving to offer a valuable contribution to the field. Nonetheless, refining its structural organization and bolstering its academic clarity could heighten its overall effectiveness and coherence. Section 3 could be improved moderately to establish stronger connections with the previously examined theoretical concepts and literature review, a refinement that could extend to the discussion of the results. Furthermore, the conclusions would benefit from specific references to the research findings. Ultimately, the article should adhere to the journal's guidelines in terms of formatting, and the bibliography should undergo a final check to ensure accuracy and completeness.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are several phrases that seem to be direct translations from the original language and need rephrasing in English. The text could greatly improve through a comprehensive and systematic revision conducted by a native speaker.

Author Response

Comments 2: 

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The primary focus of this research is to explore in which ways educators can blend together cultural heritage, education, and entrepreneurship. This is a unique topic of interest, and the article provides a significant input in this field, filling a gap for the case of Elefsina -- a historical but also degraded region of modern Greece. Although there are many other publications on the broader theme of entrepreneurship, the research adds two important aspects that enhance this idea, namely "cultural heritage" and "school education". The authors might consider elaborating their methodological context to enhance its integration with the preceding sections of the article. The conclusions align with the evidence and effectively address the main question posed, indicating that the study has successfully achieved its research objectives.

The article being evaluated is original and adeptly interacts with current scholarship, striving to offer a valuable contribution to the field. Nonetheless, refining its structural organization and bolstering its academic clarity could heighten its overall effectiveness and coherence. Section 3 could be improved moderately to establish stronger connections with the previously examined theoretical concepts and literature review, a refinement that could extend to the discussion of the results. Furthermore, the conclusions would benefit from specific references to the research findings. Ultimately, the article should adhere to the journal's guidelines in terms of formatting, and the bibliography should undergo a final check to ensure accuracy and completeness.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are several phrases that seem to be direct translations from the original language and need rephrasing in English. The text could greatly improve through a comprehensive and systematic revision conducted by a native speaker.

Response 2: 

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your positive feedback. Considering your comments, we have improved the "Discussion" section by highlighting findings from the papers in our literature review and the "Conclusion" section by referring again to the opinions of the participants and the alignment with the bibliography. Finally, we tried our best to fix the formatting and citation issues and put through extensive grammar revisions in the whole manuscript.

We look forward to your comments on the revised version of the article.

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1. Even if the subject of the study is aimed at a local initiative, it offers a wide opening to a problem that can become global - the effective way to achieve the connection between Education, Entrepreneurship and Cultural Heritage, in particular the identification of current ways that can be exploited by teachers for the preservation cultural heritage through education and entrepreneurship.

2. Please fill in the Abstract, for the first research question: The perceptions of the students participating in the program...in relation to what? (as you specified in the text of the paper in at least two other places).

3. Please fill in the Conclusions with some bibliographic references that support the results obtained.

Author Response

Comments 3: 

1. Even if the subject of the study is aimed at a local initiative, it offers a wide opening to a problem that can become global - the effective way to achieve the connection between Education, Entrepreneurship and Cultural Heritage, in particular the identification of current ways that can be exploited by teachers for the preservation cultural heritage through education and entrepreneurship.

2. Please fill in the Abstract, for the first research question: The perceptions of the students participating in the program...in relation to what? (as you specified in the text of the paper in at least two other places).

3. Please fill in the Conclusions with some bibliographic references that support the results obtained.

Response 3: 

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your valuable feedback.

Taking into consideration your comments, we have done the following to improve the manuscript:

1. We have added in the Conclusion section a policy recommendation for more universities in the world to open up to similar initiatives. Our bibliography, which comes from many countries, highlights the benefits of entrepreneurship programs.
2. We paraphrased the first research question in the abstract. We hope it is more explicit now that we aim to obtain the general impressions of the program participants for their experience.
3. We already included the alignment with similar literature in the "Discussion" section and revised the text for clarity. However, please let us know if there are still arguments that remain imprecise.

We look forward to your comments on the revised version of the article.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

No further comments.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper presents a descriptive analysis of the structure, participants, methods, and outcomes of an entrepreneurship program. It is only partially grounded in the literature about the role and impact of tertiary education in developing entrepreneurship and innovation skills. The application context is that of cultural heritage and of the University of Athens.

The manuscript is moderately innovative regarding the research context (CHE in Greece), and it describes facts and the lessons learned. As a descriptive study on a single case study, its scientific contribution can be questioned, since the research problem is only partially informative about why a new entrepreneurship program in Greece is needed, and why it is different and should be extended elsewhere. Moreover, some methodological issues arise from the reading, and the presentation and discussion of the findings are not convincing. 

I am detailing hereafter some of the main points of reflection:

Introduction

The authors provide a presentation of the Greek setting and celebrate its historical roots and its relevance at a European level. I would have expected a succinct literature review about how university entrepreneurship education is meant and delivered in Greece and what the research gaps of previous studies are. But this vital information seems quite overlooked. Then, I strongly invite the authors to pronounce the research questions that are to be tackled in the subsequent analysis.

Methods

The quantitative analysis design is fine, but I wonder if the sample is somewhat representative of a specific slice of the population and if the questionnaire was administered before and after the CHE program. Moreover, the authors should have provided a brief description of the variables and their measurements (what previous studies did inspire the use of some items, e.g., about the classification of teaching techniques?).

It is not clear why the authors propose a correlational analysis. The hypotheses of certain types of associations between variables should have been much more clearly formulated in a previous section. 

Results

The presentation of results through tables is not very effective. One could have used graphs instead. Also, the titles of the tables are sloppy (e.g., Table 4: Perceptions... about What? Where are the sample size and the reference year indicated?) 

Why do authors report alpha-Cronbach? Have the indicators been collapsed into a latent variable? Is there any factorial design? I do not think so.

Table 12 (correlation) is not referenced or commented on in the text, despite the initial (undisclosed) intuition about an association between hard skills, departments, and methods. This crucial missing information actually lowers the quality of the manuscript and its relevance for an academic audience.

It would have been intriguing to gain further insights into the sustainable business plans formulated by students within the context of the CHE program, as well as their subsequent transformation into startup ventures.

Discussion and conclusions

The discussion of findings should be improved, since it poorly informs about similarities and differences between reported results and the work of others.

The limitations of the studies have to be clearly stated.

Implications for scholars, universities, and policymakers have to be developed. 

References

Fine list, but more targeted and recent sources are needed.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

While the English language is sufficient, it would be beneficial to utilize a proofreading service to enhance the manuscript's readability.

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses below and the corresponding revisions/corrections highlighted/in track changes in the re-submitted files. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1.The main question, addressed by the research is how future Teachers can connect education, culture, and the entrepreneurial field.
2.The topic is very interesting, because the cultural heritage is one of the geographical factors for the development of local entrepreneurship.
3.This material adds some more analyses, based on student responds .
4.The methodology is clear.
5.The conclusions are clear.
6.The references are appropriate.
7.The tables are presented in a statistical way. 

The article is very good and the only improvement should be to add a hypotheses.

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses below and the corresponding revisions/corrections highlighted/in track changes in the re-submitted files.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Distinguished authors, we appreciate your research and suggest the following aspects for improvement:

- in the introduction part, we consider that the presentation of the context elements necessary to understand the proposed research framework should be made by introducing bibliographical references to support the analysis carried out

- the literature review section is too narrow and does not provide sufficient theoretical support for the concepts integrated in the paper and the argumentation of the theoretical construct

- as far as the research methodology is concerned, we consider that the sampling of the group of respondents who participated in the study is not sufficiently well argued. Also, the methodology does not include the formulation of research hypotheses that should be correlated with the proposed research questions (mentioned only in the abstract section) and later validated or invalidated in the discussion section.

- the discussion section is limited in that it lacks correlation of the results with the research questions and possible research hypotheses. We also consider that a comparative approach of the research carried out with previous studies in the field and bibliographical support would be recommended to consolidate the results obtained.

- conclusions are rather general and not specific, missing elements of recommendations or best practices, future research directions or possible extensions of the research as well as the limits of the research undertaken

- the selected bibliography is limited, and we consider that it needs to be extended

- we also recommend checking out the mention of all bibliographical resources used throughout the entire research. Also, the authors should be aware of the need to respect throughout the entire paper the rigor of correct citation practices. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses below and the corresponding revisions/corrections highlighted/in track changes in the re-submitted files. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper has been somewhat improved since my last review. However, I am still convinced that it is of marginal relevance to the academia and practice since it simply reports a descriptive case-study in the Greek context that do not add much to what is already known in entrepreneurship education literature (with the exception of the topic of the program that is focused on the cultural heritage). Measures about variables are not rooted in literature and the correlational analysis is inconclusive and left to a free interpretation of the reader. Moreover, I find that the strategy to collapse the students' perceptions into one reflective construct is of non-sense from a theoretical and practical point of view, since each item represents a single facet of the (unnamed) 'perceptions' construct that cannot be considered as interchangeable with the others. Among the other things, authors have reported some tables twice, and this inattentive style is not admissible in a second round of review. Finally, discussion about findings and conclusion seem sometimes disconnected from the rest of the work and they weakly recall the importance of the contribution in the research domain. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English language is not problematic.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your valuable feedback on our manuscript. We appreciate your constructive comments and have addressed the concerns you raised in the revised version of our paper.

1. Repetition of Tables: We have carefully reviewed the manuscript, and we can confirm that there are no duplicated tables in the revised version submitted for review. We apologize for any oversight in the initial submission and appreciate you bringing it to our attention.

2. Alignment with Literature and Analysis: In response to your feedback regarding the alignment of measures with existing literature and the clarity of correlational analysis, we have revised the manuscript to ensure that the measures are well-rooted in the literature and the analysis is more conclusive. We believe these changes strengthen the paper and enhance its relevance to both academia and practice.

3. Discussion and Conclusion: We have revised the discussion and conclusion sections to ensure they are more closely aligned with the rest of the manuscript and clearly emphasize the contribution of our research to the field.

We believe that these revisions have addressed the issues you raised and improved the overall quality of the paper. We hope that you will find the revised manuscript satisfactory and look forward to receiving your feedback.

Thank you once again for your insightful comments and for helping us enhance the quality of our manuscript.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Distinguished authors, thank you for the improvements made to the research through the additions made. We wish you much success!

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for your positive feedback.