Entepreneurship Education and Entrepreneurial Intention: the Case of Portugal

Abstract

Entrepreneurship promotes job creation, increase of competitiveness and new forms of economic development and growth of countries or regions. The research aims to understand how it has influenced the intention and entrepreneurial skills of the trainees of the project Apreender 3.0. It is important to examine how various factors, including entrepreneurship education, family background, prior experience/vocational training and propensity to take the risks, will condition the entrepreneurial intention of the respondents of this study. Based on these variables, we formulated four hypotheses. For this empirical analysis of research hypotheses, we used primary data in a form of a sample of 150 responses, collected through the online survey application. We opted for the method of the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), also called Common Factor Analysis (CFA), which can provide important information on the multivariate structure of this study, identifying the theoretical constructs. The obtained results allowed us to conclude that the entrepreneurship education and propensity to take risks influence positively the entrepreneurial intention. As for the factors of family back-ground and prior experience/ vocational training, the research did not provide satisfactory results that would allow us to confirm their influence on the entrepreneurial intention.

Keywords

• entrepreneurship
• entrepreneur
• entrepreneurial intention
• education
• family background
• prior experience
• vocational training and risks propensity