Students’ Entrepreneurial Propensity: An Exploratory Study from a Portuguese Polytechnic School

Abstract

Given the high unemployment among young and well educated people, entrepreneurial initiatives may turn to be valid actions to mitigate such difficulties. High education schools can contribute to detect and support students with potential to become young entrepreneurs and they also can involve and inspire other students. In the sequence of a branch of research into student entrepreneurship that has been developed in recent years, the aim of this study is two-fold: firstly, to estimate the entrepreneurial propensity of students at a Portuguese polytechnic school and, secondly, to evaluate the importance of academic, personal and contextual factors that may be explanatory factors to this propensity. The present study is based on a sample of 277 students who were, at the time of the research (2013), enrolled in a Master’s degree or in a Bachelor´s degree. The results obtained suggest, at one hand, that student from management areas and students from more advanced curricular years present higher propensity to entrepreneurship but also, on the other hand, that knowing entrepreneurs examples and having previous management experiences potentiate such propensity, thus confirming the usefulness of higher connections between academia and firms.