Abstract
This article analyzes entrepreneurial intentions and motivations that encourage university students of Tourism to create their own company. Methodology is based on an empirical study, using a questionnaire adapted from a model of Veciana and Urbano (Actitudes de los estudiantes universitarios hacia la creacion de empresas: un estudio empirico comparativo entre Catalunya y Puerto Rico. El emprendedor innovador y la creacion de empresas de I + D + I, University of Valencia, pp 35–58, 2004), including the desirability and viability concepts. One hundred and sixty students answered the questionnaire from a total study population of 243 official Tourism degree students of the Superior Institute of Accounting and Management of Porto. This research finds out that the university students have a very positive perception about the desire to create their own company; a 90 % of students express their desire to do it, and 83.5 % express their intention. Moreover, a 57.5 % think that within actual crisis it is more difficult to do than before it. This research lets us get an in-depth study of a student of Tourism degree, finding out his entrepreneurial attitudes. It can be the first step to wake up and encourage students’ interest for starting up their own business.
Highlights
During current crisis and taking into account that different studies including Global Entrepreneurship Monitor demonstrate the ability of entrepreneurship to solve a lot of problems related to unemployment (Storey 1994 and White and Reynolds 1996) and to economic growth and to regional growth (Neck et al 2003), it is very important to find out if University students have any intention to start up their own business, and the way the Universities can influence on students’ attitudes and their knowledge about entrepreneurship with the aim to facilitate a tendency to create their own business in the future (Wang and Wong 2004)
Entrepreneurship is very important in current society, mostly during the current crisis, and it could be a way to employ future Tourism graduated students, if we take into account the labour insertion data of 2014 of Tourism graduated students provided by the Ministry of Education of Spain that is of 52.75 %
The originality and value of the research consisted in determining if the curricular design of the degree in tourism adapted to the guidelines of the new European Higher Education Area (EHEA) have been designed considering the necessity to promote and support entrepreneurship, especially in the current context where the unemployment rate is very high among young people, which can alleviate this situation
Summary
During current crisis and taking into account that different studies including Global Entrepreneurship Monitor demonstrate the ability of entrepreneurship to solve a lot of problems related to unemployment (Storey 1994 and White and Reynolds 1996) and to economic growth and to regional growth (Neck et al 2003), it is very important to find out if University students have any intention to start up their own business, and the way the Universities can influence on students’ attitudes and their knowledge about entrepreneurship with the aim to facilitate a tendency to create their own business in the future (Wang and Wong 2004) Regarding this Honjo (2004) claims that entrepreneurship of young people can be a possible way to contribute to economic development of countries. This way the main goal of the European Commission is to cope with young people unemployment, so it is very important to analyze University functions: do Universities carry out any orientation programmes of job-placement for young people? Are entrepreneurial subjects important for education of young people?
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