Abstract
Despite the abundant scientific literature on entrepreneurship, there is still only limited information on young students’ entrepreneurial intentions. The reasons for this, may be generally found in the different conceptual approaches to entrepreneurial intention, and particularly in the variables that regulate and act as antecedents to such intentions. This bias has generated different lines of investigation into the factors relating to entrepreneurial intention among students. One line of investigation is centered on the variables that influence entrepreneurial intention, in particular, relational, educational, and psychological variables, and another is centered on the antecedents of entrepreneurial intention, amongst which is entrepreneurial interest. In this paper, we seek to analyze the relationship between the entrepreneurial interest of Spanish youth and a set of socio-educational, psychological, and health-related variables using principal component analysis. A previously validated ad hoc questionnaire was administered to 1764 students (15–18 years old). Notably, few Spanish youth expressed significantly high entrepreneurial interest; those who did were mostly men with a family tradition of entrepreneurial parents, who held high perceptions of their health and quality of life, and considered it important in business to detect opportunities beforehand and to create employment. Their principal motives were to improve their professional development, to put their ideas into practice, and to achieve economic independence. This paper proposes the early detection of entrepreneurial interests in young people in order to reinforce these interests as potential long-term initiatives.
Highlights
Entrepreneurship is an activity of great interest, especially due to the need to overcome the constant and burgeoning economic problems currently experienced by many countries in terms of unemployment, economic growth, and innovation [1,2,3,4,5].In the last decades, research interest in entrepreneurship has gained momentum in both the impetus given to it as an interdisciplinary research program [6,7,8], and in increased research production [1,9,10] on the topic
In Spain and the European Union, young people are among those most affected by the crisis and imbalance of the economic system, and they are frequently unaware of the opportunities offered by entrepreneurship as an increasingly accessible alternative [14]
Kurowska-Pysz [15] studied the effectiveness of Academic Incubators of Entrepreneurship (AIE) in Poland with a group of young people in secondary education and higher education
Summary
Entrepreneurship is an activity of great interest, especially due to the need to overcome the constant and burgeoning economic problems currently experienced by many countries in terms of unemployment, economic growth, and innovation [1,2,3,4,5].In the last decades, research interest in entrepreneurship has gained momentum in both the impetus given to it as an interdisciplinary research program [6,7,8], and in increased research production [1,9,10] on the topic. In Spain and the European Union, young people are among those most affected by the crisis and imbalance of the economic system, and they are frequently unaware of the opportunities offered by entrepreneurship as an increasingly accessible alternative [14]. In this sense, several investigations have focused on youth entrepreneurship. Kurowska-Pysz [15] saw that students who participated, perceived the development of desirable traits and the strengthening of specific entrepreneurial and management competencies, which increased their motivation to start a business after leaving the incubator
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