Journal of Enterprising Culture

The sociological literature on identity construction falls into three broad traditions. One, rooted in social psychology, underscores how individuals internalize identities that become stable self-structures. The second, rooted in dramaturgy, emphasizes how individuals contextually perform their identities through various scripts. The third, rooted in social movements literature, stresses how collective identity is nurtured and mobilized. Through 56 interviews with undergraduate entrepreneurs, I show that the three traditions are not contradictory, but rather highlight complementary processes and divergent layers of analysis. This synthesis is pedagogically and analytically useful, providing a heuristic for designing future empirical inquiry on entrepreneurial identity construction.

The most widely used entrepreneurial intention models explain only cognitive motivational factors. However, psychological studies reveal that emotional factors and counterfactual thinking such as anticipated affect also explain the intention and then behaviour. The objective of this research is to identify the role of anticipated regret in forming students’ entrepreneurial intentions. To test the hypotheses of the conceptual model integrating anticipated regret among the antecedent motivational factors to entrepreneurial intention, a hierarchical regression technique has been adopted. Data have been collected from 266 students in management degree. Our results show that anticipated regret, as well as attitude towards business start-up and perceived behavioural control, have a direct and positive influence on entrepreneurial intention described in the theory of planned behaviour. This study contributes to extend prior cognition-based explanations of the origin of earlier stages in an entrepreneurial journey.

The technological entrepreneurship ecosystem is a complex set of components and relations that enable the creation and growth of new technology firms. This ecosystem should be clearly defined and evaluated in order to reach its proper establishment. The purpose of this research is twofold. The first is to propose the main components of technological entrepreneurship ecosystem (TEE) and the second is to present some important principles for developing a comprehensive measurement framework of this ecosystem. For the first aim, through the meta-synthesis method, we identified and analyzed 34 related sources that ended in twelve dimensions (governance, capital, culture, talent, etc.). For the second aim, we defined six criteria (complexity, type of measures, design method, etc.) and critically reviewed 18 principal measurement frameworks that can be associated with the TEE. The review implied specific features such as the need to cover all dimensions of the TEE, addressing both input and output indicators, and considering both opinion-based & fact-based measures for the TEE measurement framework.

Emotions have a social effect in that individuals’ emotions, attitudes, decisions, and behavior are affected by their perceptions of others’ emotions through social interactions. We introduce the social influence of emotions perspective to the career intentions literature and demonstrate how entrepreneurial friends’ work-related emotions influence university students’ entrepreneurial career intentions. Using an experimental design ($N=283$), we reveal that entrepreneurial friends’ displayed positive emotions directly encourage students’ entrepreneurial career intentions, whereas negative emotions discourage students’ intentions indirectly by reducing the perceived desirability of being an entrepreneur. Our research contributes to the literature on career intentions, entrepreneurial intention, and emotions in the entrepreneurship context.

Today, entrepreneurship is seen as a major driver for innovation, economic growth and job creation, with entrepreneurial competencies highly sought after by practitioners and policy-makers alike. Competencies considered entrepreneurial include knowledge about how entrepreneurs create value; skills in marketing, resource acquisition and opportunity identification; and attitudes such as entrepreneurial passion, self-efficacy, proactiveness and tenacity. There is widespread consensus in the literature that entrepreneurial competencies can be developed through entrepreneurship learning. This study adopts an existing framework for entrepreneurial competencies based on previous research to investigate the role and influence that simulation games can play in the development of cognitive (knowledge and skills) and non-cognitive (attitudes) entrepreneurial competencies. The paper showcases the many benefits of using business simulation as an effective mode for developing entrepreneurial competencies. Such competencies are not only beneficial for individuals working in an entrepreneurial context — but are transferable to any business context, bringing to the fore the importance of entrepreneurial learning for all students to develop such competencies.