Moving beyond traditional measures of entrepreneurial intentions in a study among life‐sciences students in the Netherlands

Abstract

The rationale behind this study is that entrepreneurship education programmes (EEP) in post‐compulsory education mainly address entrepreneurial intentions, instead of actual entrepreneurial behaviour, and that students, compared to practicing entrepreneurs, might have a wide range of entrepreneurial intentions when entering such a programme. The question is whether or not students indeed have different entrepreneurial intentions and, if so, whether it is possible to predict these intentions based on various classical antecedents known to influence these intentions. A quantitative study among 102 life‐sciences students was carried out in order to investigate this question. The results show that students, independent of their domain of study, differentiate between different types of entrepreneurial intentions. Furthermore, the results illustrate that gender and entrepreneurial self‐efficacy have a direct influence on entrepreneurial intentions. However, the effect of gender depended on the type of entrepreneurial intentions studied. As EEP aim to increase entrepreneurship not only as a start‐up activity but also more generally in the world of work, the outcomes of this study suggest that it is fruitful for such programmes to rethink the way they operationalise, approach and aim to stimulate entrepreneurial behaviour of students.