Assessing the Awareness of Cybersecurity Within Entrepreneurship Students: The Cyberpreneurship Project

Abstract

This study addresses an important gap in both academia and practice related to the lack of a shared language and sometimes conflicting priorities between entrepreneurs and cybersecurity experts. Entrepreneurs are often pressed to create and launch products and services as quickly as possible to achieve a first-mover advantage in the market. In doing so, they tend to overlook cybersecurity threats and risks due to a lack of awareness and insufficient funding. This can lead to theft of intellectual property, project failure, and inaccurate risk assessment. In addition, cybersecurity students who study risk management often struggle to analyze real client issues due to the sensitive nature of the data and assets in most organizations. The Cyberpreneurship Project outlined within this research was designed to tackle to this problem by engaging cybersecurity students in a risk assessment of start-up businesses developed by entrepreneurship graduate students. The project is an interdisciplinary exploratory study developed to enhance awareness of cybersecurity risks and experiential opportunities among both entrepreneurship and cybersecurity students. The success of the project is assessed through a mixed-methods approach. The study also provides the academic community with valuable tools and resources to establish similar educational models at their own institutions.