Search results

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.

This study aimed to assess emotional intelligence (EI) among young adults across three Arab countries: Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

A total of 1884 university students participated from the three countries and completed the Schutte Self Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT). Data were validated by confirmatory factor analysis using SPSS AMOS version 29. Path analysis, t-tests and analyses of variance were performed to understand the influence of background variables on the EI of the study participants.

The results provide theoretical support for the SSEIT and the hypothesized relationship between managing personal and others' emotions. Although significant differences were found between participants in terms of gender and grade point average (GPA), no difference was found between participants based on nationality. The results of this study indicate the need to prioritize EI in young adults and other implications.

The importance of EI in individuals' daily lives cannot be overemphasized. However, scholarly insights into the state of EI in the Arab context are scarce.