Abstract:

Entrepreneurial education plays important role in both equipping the students with skills and knowledge necessary to start-up or run a business and entrepreneurial mindset as well as in affecting their attitudes towards entrepreneurship and overall entrepreneurial propensity. However, there are several inputs that challenge this educational process. One of them is students’ personal preference towards entrepreneurship. It may be influenced by various intrinsic as well as extrinsic factors. Among these factors, individual social capital also proved to play role in previous research. Social capital represents the external knowledge of people in individual’s environment to which he/she is exposed. This social network provides access to opportunities and resources, but it also influences individual’s perceptions. Since in case of students one of the most important social groups is the family, we particularly focused our attention to its role in affecting the student’s interest in entrepreneurial career. Therefore, the main research question of our paper is to analyze what role do family entrepreneurial role-models play in determining students’ preferences towards entrepreneurship. To find out how intentions to become entrepreneur differ between students having entrepreneur in their close family and students with no entrepreneurial role-model between their relatives we conducted a survey among 215 students of three different study programs (from the fields of business and informatics) at two different faculties of the same university in Slovakia. In our analysis of the obtained results we applied both descriptive statics and relevant sample testing procedures.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurial education, students, entrepreneurial preferences, family, role-models.