Abstract:

Studies on entrepreneurship, specifically on entrepreneurial intention are an unquestionable need in contemporaneous society, from both academic and professional point-of-view, because it is already a fact that, at the end of the university graduation, there is no job for everyone. Thus, the passage through the university should be a period of experimentation and identity construction, in which people discover and establish their individual limits.
In this context, the objective of the current work is to investigate which factors transform the university students into entrepreneurs, through the entrepreneurial intention development, and verifying the reasons that encourage the entrepreneurial attitude.
To this end, a quantitative study is presented and developed, considering a survey of 321 students from University of Beira Interior, Portugal, where it was used the logistic regression to determine the weight in the entrepreneurial intention, testing five external hypotheses that can transform the university student into an entrepreneur: (H1) the continuous self-learning and grow as a person; (H2) student’s personal fulfillment; (H3) the need to lead and motivate other people and; (H4) decide to be an entrepreneur by the student’s family influence.
After the previous stage, the aforementioned hypotheses are confronted with the internal factors of entrepreneurial intent: (a) the presence of role models and mentors; (b) the work experience; (c) the individual difference; (d) education and training; (e) business features; (f) the culture and institutional environment, and; (g) the digital transformation. From the different obtained outputs, the current research data have shown:

(i) There is a balanced distribution between entrepreneurial intention and non-entrepreneurial intention among students, in marketing, management and economics courses,
(ii) The factor of the greatest significance for the entrepreneurial intention was the (c), verbalized through the hypothesis (H2), and on the contrary, by the hypothesis (H4), which was the hypothesis of least significance,
(iii) It was not possible to affirm (nor rule out) that the "entrepreneurial intention" can be taught, however, it can be concluded that there is a correlation between the hypothesis (H2) with the factors (a), (d), and (f), which positively reinforce the entrepreneurial intent. So the university teachers must understand that the entrepreneurial intent might be possibly built and formed in the university students' minds.

Also, it was observed that it is almost impossible to have the hypothesis (H2) without knowledge/learning from the perspective of the factor (g) in the 21st century, which alters the entrepreneurship process.
In this entrepreneurship context, the workforce must gain confidence in the technological capacities developed by the universities, not least because there is an increasing number of graduates, who when graduated, the graduates may change their professional activities to another area, not directly related with the academic background, considering the entrepreneurship an attractive solution.
Finally, universities should assume that, in addition to the research, development and higher education (end activities), the universities should develop a third role: as facilitators in regional and economic development, having the responsibility to provide the teaching/learning capabilities, that allows the university student's transformation into an entrepreneur.

Keywords:

Entrepreneur, entrepreneurial intention, personal fulfillment, universities.