Factors Affecting Entrepreneurial Intention: A Study among Undergraduate Students from Arts and Science Colleges in Kerala

Abstract

Unemployment is one of the pain areas and prickly issues being faced by any economy. Unemployment not just in uneducated but also has branched its roots in the educated sectors. India being a young country constitutes a major chunk of its population be youth and to tap their full potential we need to empower our youth with the right set of skills and opportunities. Entrepreneurship is our greatest weapon to counter act this issue and to empower our youth. Youth by default are energized and empowered, they are willing to explore new territories and take up new challenges and risks. Entrepreneurship is one of the most important alternatives for the social and economic development of a country. The key to solving India’s unemployment problem is to boost entrepreneurship among the youth. It can increase direct employment by 50 million to 60 million with in next 10 years. Entrepreneurship enables economic development by facilitating creativity and innovation. The cream of the youth population, essentially undergraduate students in universities and various Arts and Science Colleges , should start to consider entrepreneurship as a career choice. As the Entrepreneurship can stem the tide of unemployment, the study set out to investigate the Attitude of entrepreneurship in the student population, and the possibility of students considering entrepreneurship as a career pathway. An entrepreneur’s journey starts with entrepreneurial intention, opportunity recognition, business initiative creation, and resource assembly, if they are to start their venture successfully. Based on the Ajzen model, this study is focused on entrepreneurial intention as a precursor of entrepreneurial behaviour. Both the social and individual characteristics of entrepreneurs are considered by the theory of planned behavior. This means that attitudes, characteristics, and social backgrounds influence an intention which will develop into a behavior (Ajzen, 2002 cited in Bhat & Singh, 2018). This theory has previously been used in the retail business research in explaining the buying patterns of shoppers, which are driven by purchase intentions. The intention to purchase is driven by three components: subjective norms, attitudes, and perceived behavior. This relates to the context of entrepreneurial intention in that attitudes towards entrepreneurial characteristics and perceived behaviors are predictors of entrepreneurial intention (Ajzen, 1991 and 2002 cited in Bhat & Singh, 2018). Furthermore, family background, which is included as part of the social background, also has an influence on the entrepreneurial intention. Entrepreneurial intention is the result of the interaction amongst three components, which can all be shaped by the learning process (Iglesias-Sánchez, Jambrino-Maldonado, & de las Paper Presented at 14th Biennial Conference held at EDII, Ahmedabad during 25 ‐ 27 February 2021 HerasPedrosa, C., 2019). In this study, we focus on innovativeness and attitudes towards entrepreneurship as these are core personality traits and have thus far been underexplored in our country. In order to promote an entrepreneurial education curriculum, there is a need to understand factors or characters that are highly influenced by entrepreneurial intention and could predict the level of intention. This will aid instructional designers, lecturers, and subject matter experts in designing the applicable method of instruction more effectively and efficiently. The study focus to identify the key factors which drive entrepreneurial intention. While innovativeness has been recognized to be one of the critical factors within certain groups of the population, there is little empirical data on the causal relationship between innovativeness and entrepreneurial intention amongst undergraduate students. The study focus on two main objectives.(1) to identify the factors influencing innovativeness, attitudes towards entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial intentions of undergraduate students, and (2) to understand the causal relationship between innovativeness and entrepreneurial intentions among the undergraduate students. The population of the study consist of undergraduate students from various Arts and Science Colleges in Kerala and 210 effective responses were received in the survey. In terms of research variables, the independent variables are innovativeness and attitudes towards entrepreneurship, while the dependent variable is the entrepreneurial intentions of undergraduate students. A self-administered questionnaire was used, which was comprised of four sections: (1) respondent demographics, (2) attitudes towards entrepreneurship, (3) innovativeness, (4) entrepreneurial intention with a 5-point Likert scale. The questionnaire was validated with 50 respondents to validate its internal consistency with Cronbach Alpha, and it was found that the Cronbach Alpha score of questionnaires for three factors is as follows: innovativeness had a score of 0.721, attitudes towards entrepreneurship had a score of 0.733, and entrepreneurial intention had a score of 0.856. The study was analysed by descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, and multiple regression. Multi-stage sampling was used to obtain the sample size, which met the requirement of confirmatory factor analysis. Pinyo (2012) recommended this sampling size calculation method/criterion for factor analysis. During this study, there were a total of 15 questions used for factor analysis, and the minimum requirement is 150–200 samples; however, a total of 210 samples were collected to ensure a good representation of the population. The study was analysed using descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, and multiple regression. Result of confirmatory analysis and multiple regression depicts that innovativeness can effectively predict entrepreneurial intention amongst undergraduate students. Therefore, higher education institutions should promote innovativeness as one of the critical success qualities needed for becoming an entrepreneur in the future. Proper planning and effective analysis, design , development, implementation and feedback are needed for getting best results.