A Partial Least-Square Mediation Analysis of the Contribution of Cross-Campus Entrepreneurship Education to Students’ Entrepreneurial Intentions

Abstract

The present paper presents findings of entrepreneurial intentions of a group of 313 undergraduate students of the University of Oradea, Romania, from different non-economic fields of study (engineering, health, social sciences, mathematics, natural sciences, humanities, and arts), including students from rural areas and other disadvantaged groups enrolled in an entrepreneurship education project financed through European Social Fund. A complex mediation chain is set in place in a net of relationships linking the benefits of entrepreneurial education to entrepreneurship self-efficacy, entrepreneurship attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and subjective norms in our estimation of entrepreneurial intentions. Using a multigroup analysis, we address the OECD inclusive entrepreneurship perspective of students ‘at-risk’ on the labor market and under-represented in entrepreneurship, identifying how the benefits of entrepreneurship education can be better capitalized by each category. The present paper advocates the necessity to extend entrepreneurship education outside the economics and business specializations.

Assessing the Impact of Entrepreneurial Education on Entrepreneurial Intentions among Romanian Doctoral Students and Postdoctoral Researchers

“…Our previous empirical research among Bachelor students based on Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour [5] confirms a positive relationship between students' antecedents and entrepreneurial intentions which is more powerful than the one between students' experiences and entrepreneurial intentions [40], the highest contribution to building students' entrepreneurial intentions being attributable to students' entrepreneurial antecedents [41]. However, entrepreneurial education programmes with a target group of doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers are not very common either in the Romanian context or in the literature.…”

Designing and Delivering a Cross-Campus Entrepreneurship Education Program

“…The present work completes our research concerns in the field of entrepreneurial education regarding the application and the impact from the perspective of students of a radiant (cross-campus) entrepreneurship program model at the university level (Dodescu & Caus, 2020;Dodescu et al, 2021a), the impact of entrepreneurial education on the entrepreneurial intention of students from different fields and cycles of study (Dodescu et al, 2021b;Hatos et al, 2022) and the evolution of entrepreneurial intentions of students and its antecedents during the COVID-19 pandemic with the exploration of inter-individual differences and intra-individual changes (Botezat et al, 2022).…”

El apoyo educativo para el emprendimiento y su relación con las intenciones emprendedoras de los estudiantes universitarios

“…Al comparar los resultados de este estudio con otros existentes en la literatura analizada, se destaca su concordancia con los trabajos de Huang et al (2021), Dodescu et al, (2021), Mei et al…”