The impact of various entrepreneurial interventions during the business plan competition on the entrepreneur identity aspirations of participants

Abstract

We intend to see how interventions during a business plan competition workshop impact the relationship between the personality, intellectual capital, entrepreneurial skills of the participants and their entrepreneur identity aspiration. INVENT is a nation-wide business plan competition in which university students from all over Pakistan (around 3000) participate. This is a 5 month process which involves a lot of training and mentoring during the various rounds. The interventions to promote entrepreneurship take place in the form of lectures, workshops, case studies, and mentoring sessions. The survey was conducted in two phases; the baseline survey was conducted during the initial workshops and the second survey was conducted towards the end of the competition and finals. In this paper, we evaluate the results of the baseline survey conducted during the initial workshops. To test the model, the constructs of entrepreneurial personality, intellectual capital, entrepreneurial skills and business program inputs were validated followed by factor analysis and structural equation modeling. We found out that the entrepreneurial interventions carried out in the workshops led to positive relationships between the variables and had a positive impact on the Entrepreneur Identity Aspiration of the participants.