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This paper focuses on the motivation of females to start businesses in developed and emerging economies. Although the issues related to the motivation of entrepreneurs have been widely studied, there are a few studies focusing on the differences in women’s entrepreneurial motivation in countries with different levels of market economy development. Furthermore, existing studies on female founders mainly adapt the concepts that have often been developed in male-dominated paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to explore in depth motivations of female entrepreneurs in different contexts and discover the dissimilarities in women’s entrepreneurial motivations in countries with different levels of economic development.

The qualitative research approach is applied in this study to explore the social-driven and profit-driven motives of female entrepreneurs. The authors have employed purposeful sampling to select cases. The authors investigated the motivations of 45 female entrepreneurs in Norway (12), Russia (21) and Ukraine (12). Semi-structured interviews were used to collect primary data. The authors have also triangulated the data collected from interviews with the data available on the internet, company reports and newspaper publications.

The findings indicate that women often pursuit business opportunities to satisfy social needs, rather than focusing on traditional business outcomes such as growth or profit. However, different contexts – the emerging economies context of Russia and Ukraine and the developed one of Norway – seem to influence the motivation to establish new ventures differently. The study found a stronger desire to contribute to a society’s needs among female founders in Norway compared to their counterparts in Russia and Ukraine. This indicates that cultural and social context in developed countries, such as in Norway, probably provides more possibilities for female entrepreneurs for self-realisation elsewhere leaving more room for focusing on societal issues in business in comparison with emerging countries contexts.

A novel conceptual contribution is the exploration of links between the social-driven and profit-driven motives of female entrepreneurs in emerging and developed economises. The study also adds to debates relating to context embeddedness of smaller firms.

How university context (UC) enhances students’ entrepreneurial intentions and opportunity recognition is an emerging topic. It is known that students learn, not only from educational programmes, but also from the context in which they are embedded. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of such context on student’s entrepreneurial intentions and opportunity recognition.

The authors use a three-dimensional institutional framework to describe UC including regulative, normative and cognitive structures. Regulative structures refer to rules and regulations, support initiatives in relation to entrepreneurship; normative structures include shared values and norms; while cognitive structures apply to knowledge among students and faculty. A heterogeneous sample of 196 respondents from five countries was used to create reliable measures of UC and to test the hypotheses with the help of regression analysis.

The findings indicate that two dimensions of UC in particular (regulative and normative) were shown to be of great importance in increasing entrepreneurial intentions and opportunity recognition among students.

The study contributes to this further by suggesting a reliable and theory-grounded scale of UC. Furthermore, this study adds to the discussion on entrepreneurship education by proving evidence of the importance of UC on entrepreneurial intentions. The important contribution is acknowledgement of the fact that social systems both constrain and enable entrepreneurs in their discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities. The authors have established that “would-be student entrepreneurs” do not exist separately from their structural context. Attempts to understand them outside of this context cannot, therefore, fully capture their nature.

This paper studies female entrepreneurship in two post‐Soviet countries – Russia and Ukraine. Employing institutional theory, the research aims to investigate the entrepreneurial environment, particularly government support programmes and the availability of financial resources, with a focus on women entrepreneurs.

This research is a qualitative investigation that comprises 60 interviews with Russian and Ukrainian entrepreneurs, bank officers and representatives of government organisations supporting the development of entrepreneurship.

The investigation provides evidence that these countries have overcome the transition from a command to a market economy and local people are gradually adjusting to the new environment. Concentrating on macro/meso and money elements from the 5M model suggested by Brush et al., the authors suggest an additional construct – “motherland” – to embed a context in a new model.

Only two factors of Brush et al.'s 5M model were considered – i.e. macro/meso environment and money (availability of financial resources). Discussion of management, marketing and motherhood is beyond the scope of the present paper.

The study reveals a broad range of managerial information and empirical data on the development of female entrepreneurship in contemporary Russia and Ukraine. The findings are helpful for policymakers engaged with these two countries.

The study is an attempt to capture the context dependency of research on female entrepreneurs, and suggests a new dimension for inclusion in Brush et al.’s 5M model – “motherland”.

This study proposes to use the Theory of Planned Behaviour to predict entrepreneurial intentions among students in five developing and nine developed countries. The purpose is to investigate whether entrepreneurial intention and its antecedents differ between developing and developed countries, and to test the theory in the two groups of countries.

A total of 2,225 students in 13 countries participated in this study by responding to a structured questionnaire in classrooms. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data.

The findings indicate that respondents from developing countries have stronger entrepreneurial intentions than those from developed countries. Moreover, the respondents from developing countries also score higher on the theory's antecedents of entrepreneurial intentions – attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control – than respondents from developed countries. The findings support the Theory of Planned Behaviour in both developing and developed countries.

The findings strongly support the Theory of Planned Behaviour. The measure of subjective norms used, a multiple‐item index encompassing the views of other people and motivation to comply with these, seems to have advantages over other measures of this concept.

Developing countries need to focus on the development of institutions that can support entrepreneurial efforts. At the same time, developed economies may need to accept that entrepreneurial intentions are dependent on the dynamism of an economic environment and possibly on risk‐perceiving behaviours.

While multiple‐country studies on entrepreneurship in developing and developed countries have been called for, no previous study has compared entrepreneurial intentions between developing and developed countries. The inclusion of developing countries provides a unique quasi‐experimental setting in which to test the theory.

The importance of small enterprise to the economy is now widely recognized not only by the Western industrialized world, but also by many countries, which formally had socialistic forms of government. Former Communist countries as well as less developed countries that are working to fuel their economies are expending considerable effort to foster entrepreneurship (Kasadara, 1992).

Drawing on entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention literature, this paper develops and tests a model that aims to explain the relationship between students' perception of learning from entrepreneurship education programs (EEP), the theory of planned behavior and entrepreneurial intention across Latin American countries.

This study uses data from the Global University Entrepreneurship Spirit Student’s Survey (GUESSS) project 2018 for 11 Latin American countries. Structural equation modeling is used to validate the theoretical model; this offers advantages over traditional multivariate techniques in evaluating measurement errors, estimation of latent variables and specification of models.

The main results suggest that a positive perception of learning from EEP is related to the antecedents of entrepreneurial intention. Moreover, attitude toward entrepreneurial behavior and perceived behavior control positively influences entrepreneurial intention across Latin American undergraduate students. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the role of EEP in terms of the antecedents of the intention and, in addition, provide evidence to the theory of planned behavior from a large sample in an emerging region.

The theory of planned behavior is one of the most important theoretical frameworks to explain entrepreneurial intention. However, in Latin American countries, quality research is hindered by the lack of data and valid measures. Therefore, the paper adds value by looking at the perception of learning from EEP and its relationship with the antecedents of intention. Likewise, it validates the dimensions of the theory of planned behavior and its relationship to entrepreneurial intention, considering a broad sample of university students in Latin America.

Con base en la literatura sobre educación en emprendimiento e intención emprendedora, este estudio desarrolla y prueba un modelo que busca explicar la relación entre la percepción de los estudiantes sobre el aprendizaje de los programas de educación en emprendimiento, la Teoría del Comportamiento Planificado y la intención emprendedora en los países de América Latina.

Este estudio utiliza datos del proyecto Global University Entrepreneurship Spirit Student Survey (GUESSS) 2018 para 11 países de América Latina. Se valida el modelo teórico mediante modelos de ecuaciones estructurales; esta técnica ofrece ventajas sobre otras de análisis multivariante tradicionales relacionadas con la evaluación de errores de medición, estimación de variables latentes y especificación del modelo.

Los principales resultados sugieren que una percepción positiva del aprendizaje de los programas de educación en emprendimiento se relaciona con los antecedentes de la intención emprendedora. Además, la actitud hacia el comportamiento emprendedor y el control del comportamiento percibido influyen positivamente en la intención de emprender de los estudiantes universitarios latinoamericanos. Estos hallazgos contribuyen a una mejor comprensión del rol de la educación en emprendimiento en términos de los antecedentes de la intención y proporcionan evidencia de la Teoría del Comportamiento Planificado de una gran muestra en una región emergente.

la Teoría del Comportamiento Planificado es uno de los marcos teóricos más importantes para explicar la intención emprendedora. Sin embargo, en los países de América Latina, la investigación de calidad se ve obstaculizada por la falta de datos y medidas válidas. Por lo tanto, el trabajo agrega valor al observar la percepción del aprendizaje de los programas de educación en emprendimiento y su relación con los antecedentes de la intención. Asimismo, validando las dimensiones de la Teoría del Comportamiento Planificado y su relación con la intención emprendedora, considerando una amplia muestra de estudiantes universitarios latinoamericanos.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue by positioning and examining some of the key issues, tensions and challenges in graduate entrepreneurship in the developing world.

The paper recognises the complexity and diversity of approaches considered by the different authors, highlighting a range of issues and challenges in their contributions. The paper is divided into the following sections: entrepreneurial intentions, attitudes and motivations; the role of higher education; and contextual cases, opportunities and challenges in graduate entrepreneurship.

The paper suggests that there is a lack of research in the field of graduate entrepreneurship in the developing world, and that further research in developing countries may help to understand and shed light on the issues evolving around graduate entrepreneurial intentions, business start‐up and education. Some preliminary themes emerge from research included in this special issue. First, entrepreneurial intentions seem to be higher in developing countries when compared with developed ones. Second, economic and institutional frameworks tend to be unfavourable to entrepreneurial activity. As in developed countries, entrepreneurship seems to be experiencing an upsurge. This could be a tremendously powerful force to accelerate economic growth and development. In this sense, higher education in general, and entrepreneurship education in particular, may be key instruments to help promote entrepreneurial activity.

The paper provides an insight into entrepreneurial intentions and related education and training in developing countries. This should be of interest to researchers, policy‐makers, and higher education institutions.

“If entrepreneurship remains as important to the economy as ever, then the continuing failure of mainstream economics to adequately account for entrepreneurship indicates that fundamental principles require re-evaluation” (Shook, 2003).