Journal of Enterprising Culture

Identifying people interested into starting-up a business is becoming more and more relevant. As widely recognized, two key aspects affecting on start-up are the role of the external context factors and the influence of entrepreneurial competencies.

With this in mind, the paper shows an application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour with the aim to assess factors believed to affect entrepreneurial intent among engineering students. As the use of well thought-out and research-tested intent models is believed to provide a good means of examining the precursors to business start-up, the survey provides a test of the robustness of the intent approach and then examines the influence of some predictors within the contextual factors.

Consistently with other leading articles, the results evidence that attitudes and perceived behavioural control effectively predicts entrepreneurial intent, while social norms have no effects. As regards the role of contextual factors and entrepreneurial competencies, they exhibit indirect effects on intent via entrepreneurial attitudes and perceived behavioural control. Thus, their contribution to favour academic entrepreneurship is confirmed. The result of the study also has valuable implications for the university system.

In this paper we investigate the dynamics of the transformative capacity of entrepreneurship education by studying the interplay between structure (society and the education system) and agency (individuals — students) that takes place in two different cultural settings: Finland and Egypt. By adopting the morphogenetic theory and by combining the etic-emic approach we compare society and the education system in these countries, and analyse Finnish and Egyptian students' views on entrepreneurship. The results indicate that structural conditioning is strong in both societies and students' views tend to follow the national policy rather than show any tendency to transform it. Thus the national policy may be an efficient tool with which to advance entrepreneurship education. The findings lead to the anticipation that while in Egypt entrepreneurship education offers opportunities for morphogenesis within and by crossing the borders of the social classes, in Finland morphostasis is more likely to take place in the future.

This research explores the relationship between entrepreneurs' self-efficacy and risk-propensity. By considering these concepts together, this paper hopes to clarify that relationship as well as somewhat contradictory findings regarding risk-propensity in the existing literature. Specifically, the review of existing literature and data presented herein suggest that any particular propensity for risk that may be exhibited by entrepreneurs is a side-effect of their relatively high self-efficacy. This paper analyzes data from semi-structured, in-person interviews with 49 entrepreneurs in three American cities. Results indicate that high levels of self-efficacy allow entrepreneurs to be comfortable taking risks. Furthermore, it may be that the mixed results of previous investigations into entrepreneurs' propensity for risk may be due in part to the heterogeneity of the samples. That self-efficacy plays a role in entrepreneurship is important because this characteristic can be developed through education and experience and could be targeted through policy initiatives.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to analyse how a company's business model needs to be adjusted if it is expanded into another cultural context. For this, we use the example of changes in the business model of a Danish IT-company opening a new office in the U.S. Using a single case study, we integrate the concepts of business models (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2005) and national culture (Hofstede, 1980). Our findings explain why and how adjustments in the business model are necessary regarding the company's communication, team composition, and customer involvement in projects. As to implications, we construct a matrix combining business models and national culture that other multinational companies can use to achieve better understanding of their business model in different national contexts.

The study explored the secrets of success described by Chinese apparel new ventures. Barney's (1991) resource-based view of the firm helped the researchers understand secrets to success from the firm's internal perspective, and the social network theory informed key secrets from the external perspective (Ahuja, 2000). In-depth interviews with open-ended questions were employed with sixteen top apparel companies in China. Results revealed that having the first successful store is the symbol of success and that success is a never-ending goal. The key secrets to success were described as the founders' ability to find the niche market, their down-to-earth attitude, unique branding position and products, and, finally, external relationships. The study will help Chinese apparel new ventures in realizing the secrets of surviving the initial stage. Academic organizations and governments may want to utilize the study findings to develop more curricula and policies that may be more fruitful for small businesses' success in the long term.