Exploring the knowledge structure of entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention

Abstract

The literature has widely recognized entrepreneurial intention as the best variable for predicting entrepreneurial behaviour. Entrepreneurial education represents a possible way to foster that intention. The interest in stimulating entrepreneurship activity has led to a growth in the number and disparity of publications that analyse the entrepreneurship education-entrepreneurial intention. This paper carries out a bibliometric analysis using bibliographic coupling to map the field’s knowledge structure. This study’s results contribute to the field complementing the previous literature reviews by addressing and verifying the development of the research lines proposed by them. Our approach is methodologically original, analysing the clusters in the network, including a characterization of each of them and the most significant and representative cited references for each group. Among the main conclusions, we find that although the theoretical base of most of the studies is found in classic theories, some alternative approaches dealing with emotional variables, mentality approaches, or psychological traits are more frequent in recent years and can play an important role in the future of the field, as the factors related to the intention-to-behaviour transition are a central focus of current research. Additionally, the contradictory results in past studies have focused the new developments around the influence of contextual factors that constitute an essential new direction for this research.