Impacts of innovativeness and attitude on entrepreneurial intention: among engineering and non-engineering students

Abstract

This study attempted to explore the impacts of attitudinal antecedents on students’ entrepreneurial intention. Comparisons between students of engineering and non-engineering backgrounds and gender groups were made. Total of 998 students from universities in Hong Kong were surveyed, leading to a number of highlights in the study. First, it is found that the learning motivation strongly correlates with innovativeness, which in return affects the entrepreneurship intention. Second, the educational measures designed for senior year students would be slightly different from those for junior year students, whilst the junior year students may need more facilitation to motivate their learning. Thirdly, the ‘innovativeness’ of engineering students is found significantly and strongly correlated to ‘self-efficacy’ and significantly to ‘attitude’. The ‘attitude’ of engineering students is found more significantly contributing to their ‘entrepreneurial intention’. The interesting results show that for engineering students, though perceiving higher levels of innovativeness, ‘attitudes’ and ‘entrepreneurial intention’, the critical attributes in determining ‘entrepreneurial intention’ are ‘attitudes’ and ‘self-efficacy’. Fourthly, attitudes seem a lot more influencing to the entrepreneurial intention among female students, whilst ‘innovation’ is the a lot more influencing among male students. There are some limitations in this study, such as the sample size and survey design. In order to secure a high level of content validity, some items of the constructs are excluded possibly due to the sample size and the uneven numbers of the different sample groups. Future study is recommended to include students from different countries in order to have more representative results, and the research model could be further extended to explore the effects of other demographic parameters.