Entrepreneurial intention : a study with MIEGI students

Abstract

In the actual complex economic context, entrepreneurship is seen as a hope and an alternative to the crisis, reducing poverty and creating new jobs. Understanding entrepreneurial intentions is the key to predict, enhance and foster entrepreneurship. However, it is a hard task to really understand and predict these intentions, given the fact that they are related to many variables as personal traits, family influence, self-efficacy, social background, and others. Regarding this, there is a well-known model, the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), that enables accurate outcomes predicting the entrepreneurial intentions, and consequently the entrepreneurial behavior. The aim of this paper is to explain the entrepreneurial intentions using the Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior. This was done by a survey developed to measure attitude towards the behavior, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control and self-efficacy in students of industrial engineering and management (MIEGI) from University of Minho.