The Perception of the Contextual Factors as Predictor of Entrepreneurial Intent: Evidences from an Empirical Survey

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.