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In this study we confirm the often assumed but largely untested belief that entrepreneurs think and behave differently than others. We examine a group of more than 700 nascent entrepreneurs and 400 nonentrepreneurs. We determine the entrepreneurs’ cognitive style propensity for problem solving (Innovator versus Adaptor); we compare their expectations; and, we examine the outcomes (performance and start-up) of their ventures. We find that nascent entrepreneurs are more likely to be overly optimistic Innovators, most people are Adaptors, and oneʼs cognitive style can indeed play a role in the initial development and outcome for the venture, but not always as expected.

This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour.

The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions.

Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poor access to project and general enterprise funding an impediment. Successful academic entrepreneurs have strong leadership, and effective management and communication skills.

The main limitation is the small study participant group drawn from a single university enterprise, which complicates generalisability. The study supported the use of Krueger’s (2009) entrepreneurial intentions model for low- and middle-income country (LMIC) academic entrepreneur investigation but proposed the inclusion of mitigators to entrepreneurial activation to recognise contextual deficiencies and challenges.

Skills-deficient LMIC universities should extensively and directly support their entrepreneurial academics to overcome their contextual deficiencies and challenging environment.

This study contributes to addressing the paucity of academic entrepreneur research in LMIC contexts by identifying LMIC-specific factors that inhibit the entrepreneur’s movement from entrepreneurial intention to entrepreneurial action.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze what is the influence of the junior enterprise environment on the entrepreneurial profile and intention of university students and what is the difference in the entrepreneurial behavior between students who participated and students who did not participate in junior enterprises.

A quantitative approach based on multivariate data analysis using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling was applied to a sample of 549 respondents.

Participation in junior enterprises influences the development of the students’ entrepreneurial profile more than their entrepreneurial intention. This study presents which behavioral characteristics are mostly developed with participation in a junior enterprise.

The questionnaire with perception conditions and self-assessment indicators; data collection by a single cross-sectional research design; the scope of the research, which did not use a probabilistic sampling.

Practical implications are to assist higher education institutions in having a more accurate understanding of the role of junior enterprises in stimulating university entrepreneurship. To implement an effective entrepreneurial education, stimulating junior companies can be a fundamental action for the HEIs, and this is valid for courses in all areas. Entrepreneurial education in a practical context, as in the case of a junior company, can increase entrepreneurial intention.

This research fills a research gap on the uncertainty of the effectiveness of entrepreneurial education in developing the entrepreneurial behavior and entrepreneurial intention of students, at least when considering the junior company as part of entrepreneurial education in the university context, presenting a robust quantitative methodology and a large sample in a developing country.