The Entrepreneurship Education Award. And What We Haven’t Built Yet.
On May 25th, I received the „Entrepreneurship Education for Future Generations” Award from Future in Economy magazine, presented by Florina Manea.
I accept it without a speech about how hard it is to build in Romania. We know already. We lived it — in balance sheets, in teams kept functioning through successive crises, in decisions no one saw and no one applauded. Romanian entrepreneurs refused to yield when every condition around them demanded it. This is no longer a story about resilience. It’s a verifiable economic fact.
The problem is not that we don’t know how to build. It’s that we haven’t transferred enough of what we know.
Not motivational speeches. Not panels about entrepreneurship delivered by people who have never built anything. I’m talking about a type of education that is systematically missing from the formation of the generations coming after us — one made by people who have crossed real risk, real losses, moments where leadership wasn’t about power but about staying accountable when no one was watching and no one was clapping.
This distinction — between performative leadership and leadership of substance — is absent from everything the educational system currently produces.
The system treats entrepreneurship education as a complementary project. Optional. To be funded when EU grants are available and suspended when they’re not.
This, despite the fact that Romania’s economy has survived precisely because those who built it didn’t wait for the system to explain how. They built in its place, sometimes against it, always without being recognized as strategic actors in any decision that directly concerned them. The experience accumulated in that process — raw, hard-won, unfiltered by theory — is the most valuable resource we have for future generations. And it is exactly what’s most absent from the classroom. This isn’t negligence. It’s architecture.
Through the Entrepreneurship Education Marathon — CONAF’s national program now reaching over 5,000 students, 850 business plans analyzed, 800 coordinating teachers across 650 high schools throughout Romania — we’ve demonstrated that the transfer is possible. Not to complete a project. To prove that the will to make this transfer doesn’t come from the system. It comes from the entrepreneurial community that decided to stop waiting for permission.
We are no longer talking about survival. We are talking about decision-making power. About the capacity to turn accumulated experience into real influence over how the next generation is formed. That is the real stakes of this award.
The award comes from a publication. And that opens a different conversation, equally important.
A press that enters educational and economic projects is no longer a neutral observer. It becomes part of the infrastructure of meaning of a society. Romania needs publications that choose to speak about construction, competence, and public responsibility — not only about crisis and scandal that generate audience. This is an editorial choice. It is not neutral. And it has long-term consequences for the kind of society we are building.
Thank you to Future in Economy and Florina Manea for this recognition.
The question that remains open is not whether we have something worth transferring. It’s whether the system will choose to receive it.
Cristina Chiriac May 25th, 2026
