The evolution of student entrepreneurship: State of the art and emerging research direction

Abstract

In the knowledge society, universities are asked to contribute to regional development and economic growth through the direct exploitation of research products and, indirectly, through enhancing entrepreneurial awareness in students. Student entrepreneurship (SE) gained increasing relevance among scholars that suggest more research is needed and identify student entrepreneurship as an emerging and growing phenomenon. In this paper, we present the results of a systematization of the current literature to define the state of the art and identify possible new research directions, analyzing 288 published articles in the main International Entrepreneurship and Management Journals and the main journals in Education and Management Business Accounting subject area. The results are presented in two macro sections. The first one is related to the corpus overview and bibliometrics which explores articles by evolution on time, author, citation analysis, and journals. The second section will involve a content analysis that highlights the main issues that emerge from the analysis of the papers, such as the most frequently used theories, data gathering methodologies and methods and mechanisms adopted by universities to support and promote SE. We are confident that these topic areas will significantly help any researcher approaching the study of SE by offering an overview of the different sub-fields in this area. Our work offers suggestions to management educators and business schools administrators to identify new ways to support student entrepreneurs by enhancing their entrepreneurial activities, and institutional leader to rethink policies that encourage entrepreneurship among students.