Personal initiative, risk-taking, creativity and opportunity discovery among students
Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy
ISSN: 1750-6204
Article publication date: 14 August 2023
Issue publication date: 10 January 2024
Abstract
Purpose
Discovering opportunities is a key entrepreneurship competence for those who want to start their own business and who choose to enter the workforce. In this study, the authors focus on the antecedents of the ability to discover entrepreneurial opportunities by uncovering how and when students' personal initiative (Frese and Fay, 2001) leads to an increase in this key competency. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of risk-taking and creativity in the interplay between personal initiative and opportunity discovery competencies among university students.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected with a self-assessment tool in two moments in time, using a sample of 103 university students from Portugal enrolled in an entrepreneurship course. The authors measured personal initiative and entrepreneurial risk-taking at the beginning of the entrepreneurship course (Time 1). Two months later (Time 2), by the end of an entrepreneurship course, the authors measured creativity and opportunity discovery abilities.
Findings
The results of this study showed that risk-taking mediates the effect of personal initiative on opportunity discovery and that creativity interacts with risk-taking and opportunity discovery. Specifically, the authors found that the relationship between entrepreneurial risk-taking and opportunity discovery is positive and statistically significant when students display average or above-average creativity. The indirect effect of the personal initiative on opportunity discovery through entrepreneurial risk-taking seems to increase when the student's creativity increases, as the index of moderated mediation is positive.
Research limitations/implications
As with all studies, there are limitations to work of this study. First, data of this study is restricted to a sample of students from Portugal. As such, the authors should be careful about generalizations concerning students from other cultural settings; entrepreneurship competencies can differ across countries. Second, the findings of the present study are based on students’ self-reports regarding their own entrepreneurship competencies.
Originality/value
This work can inspire entrepreneurship educators to look at the entrepreneurship competencies models holistically and inspire future work to explore the relationship patterns between entrepreneurial competencies.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance project “Be Competent in Entrepreneurship: Knowledge Alliances for Developing Entrepreneurship Competencies for the Benefit of Higher Education and Business (BeComE)”.
This paper was submitted to the Special Issue “Understanding the Entrepreneurial Process Through a Multidisciplinary Lens: Insights from Entrepreneurship Research in Europe” to be published in the Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy.
Since acceptance of this article, the following author has updated their affiliation: Ana Junça Silva is at the Human Resources and Organizational Behavior Departament ISCTE-Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
Citation
Junça-Silva, A., Duarte, H. and Santos, S.C. (2024), "Personal initiative, risk-taking, creativity and opportunity discovery among students", Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp. 49-71. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEC-10-2022-0150
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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