Taken from The Proceedings of the XVIII ISPIM Conference, Warsaw, Poland - 17-20 June 2007 ISBN 978-952-214-388-4.
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http://www.ispim.org/members/proceedings/ISPIM2007/files/Teixeira_Aurora_Paper_1.doc
Are engineering students more entrepreneurial than economics and business students? Results from a large survey
Abstract
In the last decade there has been an upsurge on entrepreneurship related research, namely its impact on regional and country development. Research on targeting university students is emerging. However, it is in general focused on one school-one course. Few studies analyze the differences in entrepreneurial propensity between students of different subjects. In this paper we compare this propensity among engineering, economics and business students. The reason for focusing on these groups is that these are to a large extent the individuals that are likely to create new ventures. In this regard, their behavior and expectations are likely to have a critical impact on industrial dynamics and regional venture creation. The empirical results based on a large scale survey to 2430 final year students, 985 of whom from economics/business and engineering courses of the largest Portuguese university, reveal that these latter have lower entrepreneurial potential than students from other courses and that no statistical difference exists in this regard among economics/business and engineering students. Such result turn to be quite unfortunate given the stress that previous studies put on these two majors, and the fact that substantial part of entrepreneurial education is undertook in business schools.
Keywords
Entrepreneurship; Students; Business; Engineering