engleski

Students' attitudes on entrepreneurial education and intentions of starting their own businesses

The main aim of this paper was to investigate influence of several variables on the students' intention of becoming an entrepreneur and preference to entrepreneurial education. Variables creativity, tendency to financial risk, gender and family background were used as the independent variables. Research on the crucial factors influencing the entrepreneurial drive appears as very important as it could be used as a mean for encouraging and developing entrepreneurial atmosphere and surroundings favourable for starting new businesses and driving the economy up front as the well know effect of SME.Research on the topic of Students' attitudes on entrepreneurial education and intentions of starting their own businesses has been conducted through survey on the sample of 82 students of the Faculty of Economic and Business in Zagreb. Out of 82 students, 36 of them were male, and 46 were females. Most of the students are in the fourth year of undergraduate study, 37 in the third year, one student in the second year, and 4 of them haven't answered that question. First part of the survey was consisted of 36 questions which were used to measure students’: creativity (e.g. How creative am I?), personal control concerning future career (e.g. Am I in control?), achievement in project work (e.g. Problem perception and taking pride in their own project work), intuitive problem solving (e.g. Willingness to take risks in problem solving), leadership of others: colleagues and friends (e.g. Team work), and attitudes towards financial risks (e.g. Willingness to take risks in order to achieve bigger rewards). Other part of the survey refereed to students' personal data (gender, age, year of study, family background, and their intentions towards the future after the graduation and their opinion on entrepreneurial education. Data collected was used to test several hypotheses: H1: More creative students are likely to start their own businesses, H2: Students having less financial risk aversion are likely to start their own businesses, H3: Male students are likely to start their own businesses, H4: Male students have a higher preference towards entrepreneurial education, H5: Students with the family background are likely to start their own business, H6: Students with the family background have a higher preference towards entrepreneurial education. For the hypotheses testing Mann Whitney test was used. During the examination of the analysis several interesting conclusions were found. As for the question of students’ intention the average result on the Likert scale ranging 1 to 7, one being not probable and 7 very probable result was 3, 573 and for the preference of entrepreneurial education 5, 15. Hypothesis of creativity influence on entrepreneurial intentions was confirmed with the P-value of 0, 005. Result for the influence of tendency towards financial risk on entrepreneurship intentions was not significant (P=0, 08). Gender variable was found significant in the case of entrepreneurial education (P=0, 0135) and not significant for the entrepreneurial intention (P=0, 451). Furthermore it was possible to confirm the linkage between entrepreneurial family background and the preference towards entrepreneurial education (P=0, 034) but the relationship between family background and intention for entrepreneurship was not significant (P=0, 451). On the basis of the previous results it can be concluded that more creative students are likely to start their own business, but for the preference towards financial risk there was not enough evidence to indicate significant relationship. Testing the variable of gender it was found that male students have a higher tendency towards entrepreneurial education, but it was not enough evidence to indicate the same linkage for the entrepreneurial intention. As for the relationship between family background, entrepreneurial intention and preference to entrepreneurial education it was found that the students with the entrepreneur in the family have a higher tendency to have this kind of education.

entrepreneurship; gender; family background; creativity; financial risk; entrepreneurial intentions; entrepreneurial education

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