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Recent research acknowledges entrepreneurial passion’s outcomes, but far less is known about how entrepreneurial passion comes about. In this study, the authors are interested in the emergence of entrepreneurial passion, and how competences and social network are associated with entrepreneurial passion. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors investigate whether entrepreneurial passion emerges out of socialisation, entrepreneurial experience or various combinations thereof. The authors tested the hypotheses on a data set of entrepreneurs who started their businesses with government financial support (n=1150).

The findings show that within a social environment, perceived emotional support is positively associated with entrepreneurial passion. Moreover, entrepreneurs’ task-related competence moderates this relationship positively. By investigating the emergence of entrepreneurial passion, the authors contribute to prior passion literature, which has mainly focused on its consequences.

The findings demonstrate both how entrepreneurial passion is associated with and how perceived emotional support can stem from unexpected sources, such as from a government-based start-up grant. For entrepreneurs, an increased awareness of passion’s emergence could better encourage them in their entrepreneurial endeavours. To people who are engaged in promoting entrepreneurship, our findings emphasise the symbolic and emotional aspects of instruments intended to support entrepreneurship.

In the process of pursuing an entrepreneurial career, the role of the relational institution of the family depends on the economy in which the institutions are embedded. In emerging economies, parents play a more significant role concerning their children’s career in contrast to those in developed ones. In this respect, there is limited knowledge regarding the process of pursuing an entrepreneurial career while simultaneously handling parental relations in a context that does not support entrepreneurship. This paper investigates how parental dynamics influences the process of an individual’s transition to an entrepreneurial career after graduating from a university in a developing country.

This paper is based on a longitudinal study of 15 graduate entrepreneurs in Ethiopia who were in the process of transitioning to entrepreneurial careers. Data was collected and analysed during a two and a half year period (2018–2020) drawing on 45 interviews with, and observations of, these entrepreneurs, and six interviews with parents.

The paper identifies patterns of how entrepreneurs embedded with or dis-embedded themselves from their parental relations as they developed their ventures. The findings show that there were shifts in the entrepreneur–parent relational dynamics from the pre-startup phase to the up and running phase. Drawing on these findings, the paper develops a theoretical framework of graduates’ transitioning to entrepreneurship as a process of individuation from parental relations. Further, we find that parents are both the context and the agents in the entrepreneurial process and that the graduates’ pursuit of entrepreneurial careers is instrumental for their individuation process. The findings contribute to the literature on family embeddedness in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship career literature and individuation theory.

Answering the call for research on family embeddedness in entrepreneurship, this paper explores the role of parental dynamics when a family member transitions to an entrepreneurial career after graduating from a university. The study proposes and shows how individuation theory is a relevant perspective for understanding graduates’ transition to entrepreneurial careers.