Factors influencing students’ venture creation process

Abstract

There is currently a strong global drive towards encouraging a greater proportion of students to consider and pursue venture creation as an alternative graduate career path (Nabi, Holden, & Walmsley, 2006; Leffel & Darling, 2009). Previous studies have shown that a small proportion of students are founding their enterprises before graduation and those enterprises are relatively small, primarily micro-enterprises with a modest turn-over (Fueglistaller et al., 2009). The purpose of this article is to study students’ entrepreneurship in Estonia based on the information of international survey GUESSS (Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students‘ Survey), undertaken in 2011. The comparison of the experience of Estonian students with other European countries (e.g. Hungary, Finland) will be included. The research questions answered in this study are: 1) how is venture creation process organized by students, 2) how does university support students’ entrepreneurship. The conceptual framework for describing the process of new venture creation is based on Cartner (1985) that integrates four major perspectives in entrepreneurship: the characteristics of the individual(s) starting the new venture; the organization they create; the environment surrounding the new venture; and the process by which the new venture is created. The methods of linear statistical analysis are utilized with the help of the computation package SPSS 20.0. The contribution of the paper is to improve our understanding of factors influencing students’ venture creation process and how the environment in universities should be developed for activating students’ entrepreneurship.