The importance of entrepreneurship for the maritime sector and the tendency of maritime students to be “maripreneurs”

Abstract

The possibility that technological advances may replace human power and lead to unemployment is one of the most debated issues in all sectors, including maritime. While some studies argue that this will not lead to unemployment but to a shift in the skills expected of workers, others insist that the probability of unemployment is high. Assuming that the second option is realized, it will be necessary to take some measures to create new jobs for laid-off workers. One of these measures could be to train people to have an entrepreneurial mindset, as entrepreneurship plays a key role in creating new jobs and thus increasing employment. In this study, the entrepreneurial tendencies of maritime students were investigated to see their potential to become entrepreneurs. For this purpose, the entrepreneurial orientation scale developed by Bolton and Lane was applied to 268 students at a maritime university. The data evaluated with the R program shows that the students have above-average risk-taking, proactiveness, and innovativeness skills which are important for entrepreneurship, thus they have the potential to become entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs if appropriate entrepreneurship education is provided.