Understanding entrepreneurial intent in late adolescence: the role of intentional self-regulation and innovation

Exploring Entrepreneurial Intention and Student Engagement of Youth Living in Poverty

Graduating from secondary education for adolescents living in poverty is challenging. Strong entrepreneurial intention and student engagement among youth living in poverty often play a protective role in reducing school dropout and fostering school completion, which results in improved educational attainment. However, research on this topic is scarce. A total of 1135 adolescents took part in this cross-sectional study, 50.9% of which were females. On average, they were 16.4 years old. They were all upper secondary school students from ten public and private schools in Lebanon. They completed instruments measuring entrepreneurial intention and student engagement. This study explored the covariate associations between risk and promotive factors through four dimensions of entrepreneurial intention and two components of student engagement (cognitive and psychological engagement). It shows positive associations for entrepreneurial intention with both individual factors (age) and social factors (working mother and private school). Negative associations for student engagement were found in all (individual and social) factors with the exception of the father's job, which did not present any association. The findings provide insight for policymaking to empower schools to promote school completion and educational attainment among these youth by providing policy initiatives and school-based interventions that target entrepreneurial exposure and engagement strengthening, hence meeting young people's individual, family, and school community needs.

Not Like My Parents! The Intention to Become a Successor of Latin American Students with Entrepreneur Parents

The article presents an extension of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to identify, in a Latin American university, the students who are children of entrepreneurial parents and the determinants of their willingness to succeed them. The TPB is used as a basis to analyse the intention to be a successor, and three constructs are added: affective commitment, normative commitment and parental role model. The analysis is carried out using structural equations via the partial least squares (PLS) method, which allows for the study of multiple relationships between construct-type variables. The sample includes 16,185 Latin American university students from the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey 2018 database. The results show that, in Latin American students, the determining factors in the intention to be a successor are attitude, the affective and normative commitment and the parental role model. The latter has a negative and significant effect on the intention to be a successor in the family business. One of the practical implications of this study has to do with the development of an affective feeling of the offspring towards the family business. Generating this kind of attachment since childhood could lead to achieving a greater relevance of the parental role model and a stronger interest in the succession of the business.

Research on innovation and entrepreneurship based on artificial intelligence system and neural network algorithm

Innovation and entrepreneurship are an important support for social and economic development in the new era, and it is also the key to the cultivation of practical talents in universities. In order to mine the effective information of innovation and entrepreneurship data, based on the neural network algorithm, this paper combines the bat algorithm to construct a data processing model to obtain an artificial intelligence innovation and entrepreneurship system with data analysis capabilities. Moreover, this study combines with actual needs to improve the algorithm, effectively eliminate the noise existing in the data, eliminate the interference of invalid data on the judgment ability of the system model, and choose the best denoising algorithm through comparison and verification of various algorithms. In order to verify the model proposed in this paper, the data is input into this research model by collecting data in a college survey, so as to verify and analyze the performance of the model. The research results show that the artificial intelligence system proposed in this paper has good performance and has certain practical value.

Prediction model of college students entrepreneurship ability based on artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic model

The fundamental solution to the problems of college students’ employment is to encourage college students to start their own businesses. Only by using entrepreneurship to promote employment can the real solution of China’s higher education employment problems be truly solved. Aiming at the current situation of college students’ entrepreneurship and employment, this paper builds a model system suitable for college students’ employment and entrepreneurship forecast and guidance through artificial intelligence algorithms and fuzzy logic models. The diversity-enhanced employment recommendation system developed in this paper uses the MVC three-tier architecture. Moreover, the diversity-enhanced employment recommendation system designed in this paper provides two recommendation methods: individual diversity optimization and overall diversity optimization, which takes into account the relationship between students’ personal interests and employment work. In addition, the system uses the basic idea of user-based collaborative filtering. Finally, this paper designs a control experiment to analyze the performance of this research model. The research shows that the entrepreneurship employment forecast and guidance model constructed in this paper has a certain effect.

Country’s Entrepreneurial Environment Predictors for Starting a New Venture—Evidence for Romania

Entrepreneurship has been recognized as a key contributor to the economic development of countries and societal wellbeing. Building and sustaining an adequate entrepreneurial climate challenges—to a high extent—transitional economies world-wide, pushing these countries to develop policies and strategies aimed to sustain high-quality national entrepreneurship. The paper seeks to understand the key determinants of a country’s entrepreneurial environment that drive potential entrepreneurs to assume an entrepreneurial status. It attempts to examine the countries’ entrepreneurial environment factors that influence the development of entrepreneurial spirit and affect the potential entrepreneurs’ decision to start a new venture as a desirable career opportunity. Entrepreneurial spirit is measured by entrepreneurial desirability, feasibility and social stability, taken from the Amway Global Entrepreneurship Report (AGER) 2018 data on national entrepreneurship. The results of the linear regression employed in the paper suggest that, in transitional economies like Romania, clear and stable rules and regulations, manageable taxes, an overall beneficial economic situation, as well as availability and accessibility of technology, may lead to greater entrepreneurial drive and ambition, which is fundamental to sustaining economic growth. The article ends with a discussion about the results and implications of the research.

Assessment of Entrepreneurial Orientation in Vocational Training Students: Development of a New Scale and Relationships With Self-Efficacy and Personal Initiative

Having emerged as an important concept in the organizational field, entrepreneurial orientation has also become a key idea in the context of education. Indeed, entrepreneurial education is now one of the common objectives for education and training systems in the European Union. Despite its importance, however, there is a scarcity of valid and reliable measures for assessing entrepreneurial orientation in students. The present study aimed to address this by developing and examining the psychometric properties of the Entrepreneurial Orientation Scale (EOS). A second objective is to study the relationships between entrepreneurial orientation and gender, self-efficacy, and personal initiative. The sample comprised 411 vocational training students (50.36% male, 49.64% female). The final version of the instrument comprised 32 items assessing six dimensions: innovativeness, risk-taking, proactiveness, competitiveness, achievement orientation, and learning orientation. The EOS showed good psychometric properties and its dimensions demonstrated concurrent relationships with self-efficacy and personal initiative. The EOS may be used to measure entrepreneurial orientation in the educational context and to evaluate interventions designed to promote an entrepreneurial spirit in schools, colleges, and universities.

Model of the Entrepreneurial Intention of University Students in the Pearl River Delta of China

Although the entrepreneurial intention of university students has been studied from different perspectives, the results are still not convergent, and the mechanism and outcomes related to how entrepreneurial intention could be affected by different factors lacking integrated investigation and comparative research. Based on emotional theory, the theory of planned behavior (TPB), and entrepreneurial cognitive theory, as well as the perception of specific situations encountered by university students, this paper attempts to explore entrepreneurial intention from three perspectives, including individual, family and school; and constructs an integrated model that includes entrepreneurial passion, role models, entrepreneurial education, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial intention. Based on a survey of university students in the Pearl River Delta of China, this paper attempts to explore the intrinsic mechanism of the development of entrepreneurial intention from these three perspectives. The results show that entrepreneurial passion, role models, and entrepreneurial education could have different effects on entrepreneurial intention; additionally, entrepreneurial self-efficacy plays an important mediating role. The research findings contribute to the literatures regarding the factors influencing entrepreneurial intention, providing empirical evidence to formulate policies to encourage university students’ entrepreneurship practices and help to enhance effectiveness of entrepreneurship education.

An enquiry into potential graduate entrepreneurship

Purpose

In today’s global economy, high in talent but low in growth, the capability and skills mismatch between the output of universities and the demands of business has escalated to a worrying extent for graduates. Increasingly, university students are considering alternatives to a lifetime of employment, including their own start-up, and becoming an entrepreneur. The literature indicates a significant disconnect between the role and value of education and healthy enterprising economies, with many less-educated economies growing faster than more knowledgeable ones. Moreover, theory concerning the entrepreneurial pipeline and entrepreneurial ecosystems is applied to graduate entrepreneurial intentions and aspirations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a large-scale online quantitative survey, this study explores graduate “entrepreneurial intention” in the UK and France, taking into consideration personal, social and situational factors. The results point to a number of factors that contribute to entrepreneurial intention including social background, parental occupation, gender, subject of study and nationality. The study furthers the understanding of and contributes to the extant literature on graduate entrepreneurship. It provides an original insight into a topical and contemporary issue, raising a number of research questions for future study.

Findings

For too long, students have been educated to be employees, not entrepreneurs. The study points strongly to the fact that today’s students have both willingness and intention to become entrepreneurs. However, the range of pedagogical and curriculum content does not correspond with the ambition of those who wish to develop entrepreneurial skills. There is an urgent need for directors of higher education and pedagogues to rethink their education offer in order to create a generation of entrepreneurs for tomorrow’s business world. The challenge will be to integrate two key considerations: how to create a business idea and how to make it happen practically and theoretically. Clearly, change in the education product will necessitate change in the HE business model.

Research limitations/implications

The data set collected was extensive (c3500), with a focus on France and the UK. More business, engineering and technology students completed the survey than others. Further research is being undertaken to look at other countries (and continents) to test the value of extrapolation of findings. Initial results parallel those described in this paper.

Practical implications

Some things can be taught, others need nurturing. Entrepreneurship involves a complex set of processes which engender individual development, and are highly personalised. Higher Education Enterprise and Teaching and Learning Strategies need to be cognisant of this, and to develop innovative and appropriate curricula, including assessment, which reflects the importance of the process as much as that of the destination.

Social implications

The global economy, propelled by the push and pull of technology, is changing at a speed never before seen. This is having profound political, social and economic effects which necessitate fundamental change that we organise ourselves and our activities. Current models and modus operandi are proving increasingly unfit for purpose. Nurturing and encouraging agile mindsets, creativity, supporting the testing of new ideas and ways of doing things and adapting/adopting to innovation are all critical future employability factors. Our future prosperity and well-being will be dependent on creating new learning models.

Originality/value

This work builds on an extensive literature review coupled with original primary research. The authors originate from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, and the result is a very challenging set of thoughts, comments and suggestions that are relevant to all higher education institutions, at policy, strategy and operational levels.

Enterprise education

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine young learners’ attitudes towards enterprise education within the context of a university led initiative to construct a sustainable framework which benefits identified stakeholders.

Design/methodology/approach

The research used self-completed questionnaires with 117 business studies students in Stages S4-S6 from secondary schools across Dundee and business students from Years 1-4 at one university in Dundee, Scotland.

Findings

The research reveals that respondents positively engage with enterprise education and felt that their project management, creative thinking, communication skills and confidence were enhanced by the activity of real-world business challenges. The findings support the notion that an enterprising spine embedded in the academic curriculum better equip the learner with the necessary hard and soft skills required for the employment market but not necessarily to be entrepreneurial.

Research limitations/implications

A limitation of this research was the sample size, which although representative of the pupil and student cohorts associated with the various stages of education being studied at the particular time of data collection, and is suitable for an exploratory study, the research would have benefited from being both larger and complimented by more of a qualitative component beyond the inclusion of open-ended questions.

Practical implications

As an exploratory study which informs a wider comparative study into enterprise education, the research examines learner’s perspectives and the measures they feel are required for effective engagement with enterprise education activities in schools and universities. The findings should assist education providers to deliver a better learning experience and the learners with improved enterprising and social skills, particularly the building of confidence.

Social implications

As an exploratory study which informs a wider comparative study into enterprise education, the research examines learner’s perspectives and the measures they feel are required for effective engagement with enterprise education activities in schools and universities. The findings should assist education providers to deliver a better learning experience and the learners with improved enterprising and social skills, particularly the building of confidence.

Originality/value

The research should prove useful to educational establishments who are considering the implementation of, or further engagement with, enterprise education and involvement with the business community and how such activities impact on their learners.

Desempenho, autorregulação e competências de empreendedores de indústrias criativas brasileiras

RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo foi testar o poder preditivo das competências empreendedoras sobre o desempenho de profissionais nas indústrias criativas. O desempenho foi mensurado com base na percepção dos empreendedores sobre indicadores de resultado do negócio (e.g., lucratividade) e sobre relacionamentos sociais e carreira (e.g., a imagem do negócio e os avanços na própria carreira). A mediação exercida pela autorregulação também foi testada. Participaram 295 profissionais das indústrias criativas brasileiras. Os dados foram analisados por meio de análises fatoriais e de análise de regressão multivariada. Os resultados indicam que as competências de estratégia e planejamento foram preditores da percepção de desempenho, tanto dos indicadores de resultado do negócio (R2 RF = 0,20) quanto dos relacionamentos sociais e de carreira (R2 RF = 0,24). Uma dimensão da autorregulação, automonitoramento, apresentou mediação parcial sobre a variável-critério (0,09 e 0,10, respectivamente, p<0.001). Os empreendedores do setor de música apresentaram escores significativamente mais elevados nas competências avaliadas. Implicações práticas dos resultados são discutidas.

Transdiagnostic Case Conceptualization of Emotional Problems in Youth with ASD: An Emotion Regulation Approach

Youth with autism spectrum disorder often struggle to cope with co-occurring anxiety, depression, or anger, and having both internalizing and externalizing symptoms is a common clinical presentation. A number of authors have designed cognitive-behavioral interventions to address transdiagnostic factors related to multiple emotional problems, although none have applied this focus to youth with ASD. The current review article describes how a transdiagnostic emotion regulation framework may inform cognitive-behavioral interventions for youth with ASD, which until now have focused almost exclusively on anxiety. Research is needed to empirically test how a transdiagnostic intervention can address the processes of emotion regulation and assist youth with ASD to cope with their emotional disorders.