Digital Explosion and Entrepreneurship Education: Impact on Promoting Entrepreneurial Intention for Business Students

Abstract

This study aims to examine the effect of entrepreneurship education and artificial intelligence (AI) development on entrepreneurial intentions while investigating the mediating role of perceived behavioral control. The proposed model also accounts for individual and contextual socioeconomic factors. This study tries to fill the gap in the entrepreneurship literature, which is still lacking with respect to the impact of new technologies on entrepreneurship intentions and shows conflicting results regarding the influence of entrepreneurship education. Our study surveyed 223 business students in Lebanon. The context of this study is of high importance, particularly since the country is currently facing a deep, multifaced political, economic, and financial crisis, and entrepreneurship might be considered an important channel for generating basic sources of income, steering the recovery process, and increasing Lebanese resilience against this highly unstable economy. The structural equation modeling technique (SEM) was conducted to validate the hypotheses. The results show that perceived behavioral control fully mediates the relations between performance expectancy of AI solutions, entrepreneurship education, and entrepreneurial intention. Risk aversion and social support exert a direct impact on entrepreneurial intentions. The findings highlight the need to account for entrepreneurship education and AI development when analyzing entrepreneurial intentions.