Entrepreneurial-related Programmes and Students’ Intentions to Venture into New Business Creation: Finding Synergy of Constructs in a University of Technology

Abstract

Entrepreneurial education has received a fair amount of attention locally and internationally. Interestingly, disparities continue to exist in the quality of entrepreneurship education programmes on offer, particularly in curriculum design, delivery methods and forms of assessment within higher education institutions in South Africa. We examined the relationship between the entrepreneurial content of the curriculum (ENTCC), attitude towards entrepreneurship, general self-efficacy and students’ intentions towards entrepreneurship. The study is located within a quantitative research paradigm and the sample of 263 was drawn from final year students from the Faculty of Management at a South African university of technology (UoT) who were studying various business-related programmes in 2014. Data were analysed using correlation and regression analysis. The results indicate that the ENTCC, students’ attitude towards entrepreneurship and students’ self-efficacy exhibit significant predictive relationships with students’ intentions to venture into new business creation. Our study makes two major contributions: (i) it fills the gap in entrepreneurship education in order to revisit our curriculum to make the module/s more ‘hands on’ and (ii) it provides an avenue to further explore the feasibility for a fully fledged entrepreneurship programme with mandatory, elective and incubation start-up practical training in conjunction with the Science Park, Technology, Transfer and Innovation Centre within the university.