Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of spirituality and emotional intelligence in understanding creativity, attitudes towards entrepreneurship, perceived behavioural control (PBC) and entrepreneurial intention of students of a Portuguese higher education institution. A conceptual model is proposed representing direct and indirect relationships among these constructs.

A quantitative approach was adopted in the form of a survey questionnaire applied to a sample of 345 university students. To test the hypothesised relationships between the constructs, the authors used the path analysis technique.

Results show that personal attitudes towards entrepreneurship and PBC have a positive effect on entrepreneurial intention, and mediate the effect of emotional intelligence on entrepreneurial intention. Emotional intelligence has a direct positive effect on creativity. The results reveal no or a tenuous influence of spirituality in the various concepts studied.

It is expected that the model can serve as a support for facilitating and promoting entrepreneurship in higher education environments. It could be of valuable use to furthering our understanding of the role of individual/psychological characteristics, motivational and attitudinal factors in fostering entrepreneurial intention of university students.

Some studies suggest that psychological factors play an essential role in developing alternative models to the entrepreneurial process. However, the studies that directly explore how individual differences in emotional intelligence, spirituality and creativity relate to entrepreneurial intention are relatively few.

This study aims to investigate the structural relationships between pedagogy methods, creativity and entrepreneurial intentions. This study theorizes that work-integrated and active learning methods positively influence personal creativity, which in turn positively influences entrepreneurial intention. Moreover, entrepreneurial inspiration moderates the impact of creativity on entrepreneurial intentions.

A sample of 701 valid questionnaires from university students is used to investigate the proposed research model empirically. As the methodological approach, structural equation modelling with multigroup analysis is used.

The statistical results confirm the positive impacts of work-integrated and active learning methods on individual perceived creativity and of creativity on entrepreneurial intentions. Further, inspiration towards entrepreneurship moderates the link between individual creativity and entrepreneurial intentions.

This research fills the gap in the realm of examining the structural relationship among learning methods, creativity and entrepreneurial intentions in an emerging economy context. Specifically, this study confirms experiential teaching methods as important predictors of the development of students’ creativity capability and the moderating role of entrepreneurial inspiration in the relationship between perceived creativity and entrepreneurial intention. These results add to the academic literature on entrepreneurial intentions in emerging economies and provide new insights into how universities in emerging economies can foster the entrepreneurial intentions of their students.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between creativity, entrepreneurial intention and social innovation tendency within academic community members (namely, students and professors/researchers).

A questionnaire was administered to nearly 300 students and professors/researchers in Portuguese higher education institutions, whereupon a mediation analysis was performed to understand the aforementioned relationship.

The results indicate a positive relationship between individual creativity, entrepreneurial intention and social innovation tendency and that entrepreneurial intention mediates the relationship between creativity and social innovation tendency.

Firstly, the results obtained to fit the specific characteristics of the sample used, suggesting that it would be risky to extrapolate to other contexts. Secondly, although the constructs used to measure variable creativity are based on the extant literature, these may be open to debate and possibly, therefore, alternative measures could have been used.

The findings of the paper have important practical implications within the university context, namely: that study programmes should be designed to address the entrepreneurial potential of their students, teaching and research staff; that social entrepreneurship, volunteering activities and the development of creativity skills should be stimulated; and, finally, that social innovation should be at the core of a university’s mission.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first time that the relationship between creativity, entrepreneurial intention and social innovation tendency has been empirically tested. To do this, a conceptual framework is proposed which suggests that individual creativity can be perceived by means of three interconnected constructs (the self, family and university creativity), which, in turn, predict entrepreneurial intention and social innovation tendency.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the complex relationships between gender and entrepreneurial intentions.

This paper uses a two study design where the second study is a constructive replication of the first study. The first study uses a cross-sectional design, while the second uses a design where data collection of variables were temporally separated. The analysis is conducted using Hayes (2014) process macro using 1,000 bootstrapped draws to understand the interaction between gender and creativity and the potential mediation involving life roles and goals.

The empirical results are threefold. First, the results show that creativity has a direct and positive effect on entrepreneurial intentions. Second, gender did not have a direct effect on entrepreneurial intentions, and finally, gender showed an interaction with creativity such that in both the samples, creativity had a stronger relationship with intentions among women.

The results point to the inclusion of creativity exercises in the entrepreneurship curriculum as well as to create and tailor programs to enhance women’s entrepreneurial intentions.

Using a two study constructive replication approach, this study demonstrates the complex effect of gender on entrepreneurial intentions. Traditionally, women are argued to have lower entrepreneurial intentions, but this study finds that creative women were more likely to have entrepreneurial intentions in the sample. The results also show that the women’s family salience (life roles and goals) did not mediate the relationship between gender and entrepreneurial intentions.

The rise of creative economy has been the subject of considerable interest in the recent literature. Despite the growing effort to investigate entrepreneurship in creative industries, little work has been done to scrutinize the relationship between individual attributes of creative entrepreneurs and the new venture outcomes. Prior research shows that entrepreneurial creativity and opportunity recognition are the major determinants of entrepreneurs’ behavioral posture in the new venture process. Therefore, this study aims to explore the typology of creative entrepreneurs’ attitude to new venture creation using entrepreneurial creativity and opportunity recognition to categorize entrepreneurs in creative industries.

A sample of 291 entrepreneurs in creative industries of Taiwan and cluster analysis was used to categorize the research data.

The results identify four types of creative entrepreneurs, namely “creative constructionist”, “creative opportunist”, “creative designer” and “creative producer”. To better understand the role of creative entrepreneurs in affecting new venture success, the career outcomes perceived by entrepreneurs were compared between different categories. Results suggest that entrepreneurs who are categorized as “creative constructionist” have better career success in firm’s creative performance, personal career achievement, social reputation, entrepreneurial satisfaction and entrepreneurial happiness. Moreover, findings also suggest that constructionist type of creative entrepreneurs have the lowest intention to quit the entrepreneurial career.

This paper confirms that entrepreneurial creativity and opportunity recognition complement each other to accomplish entrepreneurs’ career success. Its findings shed light on entrepreneurs’ attribute typology as well as how the typology is linked to entrepreneurial career success in creative industries. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.

Discovering opportunities is a key entrepreneurship competence for those who want to start their own business and who choose to enter the workforce. In this study, the authors focus on the antecedents of the ability to discover entrepreneurial opportunities by uncovering how and when students' personal initiative (Frese and Fay, 2001) leads to an increase in this key competency. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of risk-taking and creativity in the interplay between personal initiative and opportunity discovery competencies among university students.

Data were collected with a self-assessment tool in two moments in time, using a sample of 103 university students from Portugal enrolled in an entrepreneurship course. The authors measured personal initiative and entrepreneurial risk-taking at the beginning of the entrepreneurship course (Time 1). Two months later (Time 2), by the end of an entrepreneurship course, the authors measured creativity and opportunity discovery abilities.

The results of this study showed that risk-taking mediates the effect of personal initiative on opportunity discovery and that creativity interacts with risk-taking and opportunity discovery. Specifically, the authors found that the relationship between entrepreneurial risk-taking and opportunity discovery is positive and statistically significant when students display average or above-average creativity. The indirect effect of the personal initiative on opportunity discovery through entrepreneurial risk-taking seems to increase when the student's creativity increases, as the index of moderated mediation is positive.

As with all studies, there are limitations to work of this study. First, data of this study is restricted to a sample of students from Portugal. As such, the authors should be careful about generalizations concerning students from other cultural settings; entrepreneurship competencies can differ across countries. Second, the findings of the present study are based on students’ self-reports regarding their own entrepreneurship competencies.

This work can inspire entrepreneurship educators to look at the entrepreneurship competencies models holistically and inspire future work to explore the relationship patterns between entrepreneurial competencies.

The current study, which is based on social learning theory and social cognitive theory, intends to investigate the impact of entrepreneurial leadership on employee creativity at both the individual and team levels. In particular, the authors predict a mediating mechanism at both levels: employees’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Further, the authors consider whether the climate of support for innovation is a contextual element affecting the relationship between employees’ perceptions of entrepreneurial leadership and their own entrepreneurial self-efficacy.

The research hypotheses were tested using multilevel structural equation modeling on 191 employees nested in 49 entrepreneurial ventures in China.

The results indicated that entrepreneurial leadership positively correlates with employee creativity at individual level. Moreover, this study found that individual followers’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy partially mediates the association between individual perceptions of entrepreneurial leadership and employee creativity, whereas team members’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy fully mediates the association between team members’ perceptions of supervisors’ entrepreneurial leadership and employee creativity. Further, this research demonstrates the role of team-level climate of support for innovation as a boundary condition that strengthens the effect of entrepreneurial leadership on individual entrepreneurial self-efficacy.

Considering entrepreneurial self-efficacy to be a type of entrepreneurial context-specific self-efficacy, this study presents one of the first empirical examples of the mediating function of entrepreneurial self-efficacy in the association between entrepreneurial leadership and employee creativity. Additionally, this research demonstrates the role of team-level climate of support for innovation as a boundary condition that strengthens the effect of entrepreneurial leadership on individual entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Further, this study provides a methodological contribution by simultaneously assessing all three variables of the mediation process at the individual and team levels: entrepreneurial leadership, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and employee creativity.

Although the role of creativity in the entrepreneurial process has long been analysed, only recently scholars have begun addressing its influence on entrepreneurial intentions, showing that complex dynamics characterise this relationship. The purpose of this paper is to understand the surrounding mechanisms (moderation and mediation) that connect creativity to entrepreneurial intentions, with a focus on social context and entrepreneurial self-efficacy.

A structured questionnaire was administered to a sample of 507 students from 17 to 21 years old. The effect of creativity on entrepreneurial intentions and the moderating role of social context were tested with a three-step hierarchical regression, while the mediating effect of self-efficacy was tested by a multiple regression analysis based on the bootstrapping method.

The results reveal that: peers who encourage entrepreneurship moderate the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurial intentions by strengthening this relationship, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy mediates the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurial intentions.

In light of these results, institutions should draw attention to how creative potential in students differs in order to provide new educational programmes to strengthen self-efficacy in entrepreneurial students and support encouraging social context of peers in which entrepreneurial intentions can be fostered.

The study, by responding to the suggestions of conducting research on the interface between creativity and entrepreneurship (Shane and Nicolaou, 2015), brings new empirical details regarding the mechanisms that link creativity to entrepreneurial intentions. Furthermore, it casts light on the interaction between dispositional and social variables, showing the crucial role of peers in enhancing the interaction between creativity and intentions.

Opportunity identification is a driving force in the entrepreneurial process, which is particularly dependent on entrepreneurs' creativity to recognize potential or hidden entrepreneurial opportunities. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to use opportunity recognition and entrepreneurial creativity to cluster typologies of new ventures and to explore their differences on the performance of new ventures.

In total, 300 new ventures are studied from government‐funded incubators in Taiwan including 54 university incubators, six government incubators, and five non‐profit incubators with a 46 percent response rate. The studied new ventures have been established less than ten years and are not yet IPO. One entrepreneurial member from each new venture is selected to represent his or her company to respond to the questionnaire.

Results of cluster analysis, using the dimensions of opportunity recognition and entrepreneurial creativity, reveal four types of new ventures: “passive”, “creativity‐driven”, “opportunity‐driven”, and “proactive”. Results also indicate that the “proactive” new ventures show better performance in entrepreneurial satisfaction and innovative capability.

The new venture typologies have the potential to serve as a benchmark for practitioners as well as a guide for policy‐makers with regard to the varying nature of opportunities and creativity needs by different types of firms. Moreover, the performance of different types of new ventures contributes to the theoretical development regarding entrepreneurial processes of opportunity recognition and entrepreneurial creativity, especially as relevant for new ventures and entrepreneurs with varying characteristics.

The typologies of new ventures have received much less attention in the entrepreneurship literature than in other management fields.

This paper proposes and empirically assesses a social cognition conceptual model linking creativity (both artistic and scholarly), entrepreneurial personality traits, and entrepreneurial intention. Specifically, the study draws on social cognition perspectives to investigate the potential role of creativity as a mechanism underlying the relationship between entrepreneurial personality traits and entrepreneurial intention.

Using a sample of 194 creative nascent entrepreneurs, the study tests the proposed model using Partial Last Squares Structural Equations Modeling (PLS-SEM).

The study reveals that, among entrepreneurial personality traits, only risk-taking propensity is positively related to entrepreneurial intention. Interestingly, while artistic creativity seems to enhance entrepreneurial intention, scholarly creativity is found to stimulate a more cautious approach toward venturing. The findings also reveal that scholarly creativity fully mediates the relationship between tolerance for ambiguity and entrepreneurial intention.

The study makes an original contribution by showcasing how both artistic and scholarly creativity developed in the same socially situated cognitive environment can differentially influence decision-making and the relationship between entrepreneurial personality traits and entrepreneurial intention, thus contributing to social cognition perspectives and research in entrepreneurship.