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To contribute to the knowledge of factors that shape entrepreneurial beliefs, the purpose of this paper is to theorize and empirically test how individuals’ general attitudes toward entrepreneurship based on exposure to others’ prior entrepreneurial activities are related to beliefs surrounding current entrepreneurial opportunities. Positive attitudes based on prior exposure can lead to bias in the beliefs about current opportunities being evaluated, suggesting that positive affect can be a negative influence in the entrepreneurial process.

The sample is the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics I, a nationally representative, longitudinal data set of US adults in the process of starting businesses. Regression analyses demonstrate how general attitudes are associated with beliefs about level of future sales, probability of venture survival, and levels of financial, competitive, and operational uncertainty.

Nascent entrepreneurs with more positive general attitudes toward entrepreneurship form more optimistic estimates of the financial performance and survival likelihood of their future ventures. They also estimate lower levels of environmental uncertainty.

This research extends understanding of the impact of prior exposure to entrepreneurship in the entrepreneurial process. It also contributes to increasing understanding of the determinants of entrepreneurial beliefs and extends prior work that has considered cognitive determinants (knowledge and motivation) to consider emotional determinants (affect-infused attitudes), consistent with the heightened recent interest in the role of emotion in entrepreneurship. This research provides a different perspective on the role of affect in the entrepreneurial process. While prior work addressing affect in entrepreneurship has explored the positive aspects of affect, the present study suggests that affect may not have a uniformly positive influence.

Although entrepreneurial learning is widely believed as an important factor in shaping one’s entrepreneurial intention, research finds little consistent results on the direct effect of entrepreneurial learning on one’s entrepreneurial intention. To solve the conflicted effects of entrepreneurial learning, the purpose of this paper is to explore how entrepreneurial learning may impact individual entrepreneurial intention.

Drawing on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), the authors proposed and tested on a three mediating effect model, in which entrepreneurial learning is associated with entrepreneurial intention through attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control toward entrepreneurship. Moreover, the moderating role of prior exposure to entrepreneurship was proposed and tested. Based on a sample of 200 university students who have taken entrepreneurial courses in Hong Kong, the hierarchical regressions and moderated mediation tests were used to test the hypotheses.

The authors find that the positive relationship between entrepreneurial learning and entrepreneurial intention is significantly mediated by attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control toward entrepreneurship; and the mediating effects of entrepreneurial learning on entrepreneurial intention via attitudes and perceived behavioral control respectively, is moderated by exposure to entrepreneurship.

Contributing to the literature of entrepreneurship education, this study identifies individuals who exposed to the same entrepreneurship education may perform differently in entrepreneurial learning. The findings also help us to better understand the mechanism through which and under which context one’s entrepreneurial learning may enhance his/her entrepreneurial intention.

Scholars have typically examined family business exposure as an aggregate variable. However, it is probable that this trend oversimplifies the complexity of family exposure and its nuanced influence on entrepreneurial behaviour. Thus, to extend the theoretical boundary, this inquiry investigates distinct dimensions of family exposure in Nigeria while drawing on the theory of planned behaviour.

Data were collected from five public universities in Nigeria. A sample of 1,314 respondents was analysed using a partial least squares structural equation modelling approach to determine the influence of alternate family business exposures.

The results show that entrepreneurial exposure in the forms of parent, family member and work involvement have salient and distinctive influences on implementation intention to the extent that entrepreneurial self-efficacy, attitudes and subjective norms are uniquely impacted.

This study offers novel insights on the predictors of entrepreneurial implementation intention through the distinctive effects of (1) family member exposure, (2) parent exposure and (3) work involvement exposure among students in the family firm context.

In spite of research on entrepreneurial intentions being a mature field of enquiry, little is known about the influence of experience on entrepreneurial intentions, especially among the youth and in developing contexts. This paper aims to investigate the impact of different types of experience – entrepreneurial early childhood experiences, prior start-up experiences, work experience, education and peer influence – on the entrepreneurial intentions of South African youth.

First, a quantitative survey of 827 secondary students was administered, and the results were analysed by means of hierarchical logistic regression. Second, two focus groups were conducted with secondary students representing two distinct segments of South African society to shed light on some of the unique survey findings.

The results revealed that the experiences of having attempted to start a business and having previously worked in a business, as well as entrepreneurship education, have a positive influence on youth entrepreneurial intentions, while peers' entrepreneurial intentions exert a negative influence. Peer influence and contextual factors such as family and community support, which are catalytic in other parts of the world, appear to dampen youth entrepreneurial intentions because of fear of failure and fear of competition.

This paper examines the influence of a broader taxonomy of experience types on youth entrepreneurial intentions than found in previous studies. It highlights the unique role played by specific types of experience and points to the need to include extra-curricular entrepreneurial experiences in interventions aimed at fostering youth entrepreneurial intentions in developing nations.

Entrepreneurship is a social role, suggesting that different communities and societies will hold different typical expectations for who the entrepreneur should be (i.e., personal characteristics) and how an entrepreneur acts (behaviors). In this chapter, we describe the results of two studies that elucidate the content of the entrepreneur’s role and assess its generalizability and cultural uniqueness in three cultures: the United States, China, and Taiwan. We do so by examining the prototypes, or culturally shared implicit theories or schema that individuals hold about the attributes and behaviors characterizing the entrepreneur’s role. We suggest that the entrepreneur prototype has overlapping content across these three cultures, and that they also reflect cultural uniqueness due to different political, economic, and social histories and conditions. First, we conducted an initial inductive study designed to elicit a comprehensive list of representative characteristics and behaviors that are commonly recognized in each society as typical of an “entrepreneur,” resulting in an inclusive list of 87 prototypical/anti-prototypical items. These items were subsequently used in a survey-based study to assess the specific content that each culture endorses as prototypical of an entrepreneur, the extent to which those prototypes varied across the three cultures, and relationships of prototype evaluation with individuals’ personal values and exposure to entrepreneurship. Results showed that prototypes were distinct in each culture, but with some overlap of attributes, especially between China and Taiwan. Results showed some support for the relationship between top-ranked prototypical attributes and individuals’ exposure to entrepreneurship as well as openness-to-change values and conservation values, but also interesting differences in these relationships in the three cultures. The findings highlight that role prototype formation processes across these cultures were etic, but that the content of the role may well be emic or culturally specific.

This research aims to identify the intentions behind becoming an entrepreneur and the perception of entrepreneurial failure among different groups of students. There has been significant research discussing the motivations behind becoming an entrepreneur. However, such a research study is often focused on individuals who are already in the entrepreneurial process. Therefore, this research focuses on the understanding of the entrepreneurial process specified on the intentions of becoming an entrepreneur and the associated risk, in the context of a learning process.

The perspectives of students towards becoming an entrepreneur and their perception of associated risk are identified. A comparative exploratory case study method is used. Three cases developed in the light of empirical evidence consist of Business, Law and Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students.

Major results show that the law and STEM students were on the same line in terms of motivational factors, such as being career driven. In contrary, the business students were more driven by personal factors such as leaving something behind and building something meaningful.

Whilst studies have attempted to understand entrepreneurial intentions, little work has considered students and their views on becoming entrepreneurs. Even with studies that looked at this subject matter, the focus was mainly business students. The authors build on previous work and construct the authors' views based on multi-disciplinary student base to know more about their intentions to become an entrepreneur. The science and law students were more influenced by external factors, whereas business students were focused more on their personal goals. Such classification of the diverse intentions based on student discipline opens a new and promising research avenue to better develop entrepreneurial education not only for business students but across all disciplines in higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of common undergraduate entrepreneurship classroom activities on students’ motivational processes related to entrepreneurial careers.

In total, 700 undergraduate students from a variety of majors at a large midwestern university in the USA were invited to take a web-based survey. They were asked to indicate which experiential activities they would participate/were participating in as part of their program.

The findings show that students’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) is a driving force in classroom activities enhancing students’ intentions. However, the authors also found that the type of classroom activities that are common in entrepreneurship education negatively impact students’ ESE.

The generalizability is limited to the US region and the link from intention to behavior goes untested, but results strongly supported the adoption of social cognitive career theory to the entrepreneurship domain.

This study lends support to the argument that promoting the learning process in entrepreneurship education should focus on real-world experience, action, and reflective processes to engage students in authentic learning, which should lead to greater entrepreneurial abilities and propensity, and eventually to enhanced entrepreneurial performance, which benefits individuals and societies.

This study suggests that the goals and pedagogical approaches to teaching entrepreneurship are issues that educators may need to revisit and update if the economic benefits of entrepreneurship are to be fully realized.

While the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurship activity is well documented in extant literature, this study found that activities that are common in entrepreneurship education may negatively impact students’ ESE and need to be further explored.

With internet technology, knowledge acquisition surpasses the confinement of the university's campus or syllabus. Concurrently, an entrepreneurship programme has recently been offered to students, positioning universities as an experimental ground for the breeding of entrepreneurs. Thus, this paper seeks to evaluate the effect of entrepreneurship education syllabi empowered with current information communication technology (ICT) exposure towards students' entrepreneurial self‐efficacy together with social norms and their entrepreneurial intention; and whether this latest development lives up to stakeholders' expectations.

Data were collected through a census survey of entrepreneurship students at four MSC‐Status universities that offer entrepreneurship degree programmes. Quantitative analyses such as regression were performed.

Specialised entrepreneurship education with ICT exposure significantly affects a student's entrepreneurial self‐efficacy. However social norms were found to be a poor predictor towards entrepreneurial intention, explaining the diminished level of influence lecturers had upon their students' behaviour.

This study focuses on a group of entrepreneurship students who are exposed to ICT applications at that stipulated time, and as such, the findings cannot be generalised as technology evolves rapidly. The findings are also limited to only entrepreneurial intention and demonstrate the outcome in Malaysia's higher education industry.

The two direct stakeholders i.e. the university's management and lecturers, may need to reconstruct their respective initiatives by introducing “creative disruption” philosophies, policies and pedagogies to facilitate the “creative destruction” mode of education into realising its full potential.

This paper provides an insight into challenges that universities face in delivering distinctive knowledge consisting of theories and practices. Together, they require constructive and radical yet practical initiatives.

Building on social career cognitive theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate outcome expectations as a mediator and subjective norms as a moderator in the relationship between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intentions.

Using a sample of 1,026 students from US public and private universities retrieved from the Entrepreneurship Education Project, this study tests a first-stage moderated mediation model in a two-step process.

Results show that entrepreneurial self-efficacy is positively related to entrepreneurial intentions through the partial mediating effect of entrepreneurial outcome expectations, and that this relationship is consistently significant and positive for individuals with lower, average and higher subjective norms towards entrepreneurship.

These findings contribute to the literature on entrepreneurial intentions by providing a comprehensive overlook on the mechanisms and boundary conditions relevant for intentions.

These results reinforce the need for educators and policy makers to ensure programs manage outcome expectations and recognize the role of peer, parent and mentor role models on the construction of these expectations and, consequently, on entrepreneurial intentions.

Exploring the combined effect of entrepreneurial outcome expectations as a mechanism and subjective norms as boundary conditions on the relationship between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intentions is an unexplored issue to date, and helps to understand how and why entrepreneurial intentions emerge.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the personal and contextual factors that influence entrepreneurial intention between two student populations from the United States and Portugal.

The data were obtained through the Entrepreneurship Education Project, a large study that collected over 17,000 responses from students in 70 countries. A subset of this data resulted in 3,008 responses from students in the United States and 1,026 respondents in Portugal. The model predicted that entrepreneurial intention would be influenced by entrepreneurial capital and entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), and that the model results would be stronger in the US than in Portugal.

The main effect hypotheses were supported while moderating effect hypotheses were not, although post hoc analysis revealed some interesting culturally relevant anecdotes.

This study contributes to the generalizability of previously established antecedents of entrepreneurial intention to two highly different cultural contexts – the United States and individuals from Portugal. The cross-sectional, correlational nature of the survey limits the findings to one point in time.

Findings suggest that having the opportunity to start a business as part of entrepreneurship education may provide useful in not only enhancing ESE but also in entrepreneurial intentions. Programs might consider including starting a business, either a new venture, or as part of a corporate program as part of the degree requirement. It may be that starting a business will provide critical experience students need to choose entrepreneurship as a career.

This research explored the similarities and differences in characteristics between students from a highly individualistic nation with low uncertainty avoidance (United States) and one that is more collectivist and less uncertainty avoidant (Portugal). Findings highlight the importance of entrepreneurial capital, ESE and the role that culture plays in students' entrepreneurial intentions.