Abstract:

Intentions have long been used and assessed in order to help explicate the self-predicted desire to engage in a predetermined behaviour. That is, once the formation of an intention occurs, actual behaviour is expected to duly follow. In fact, a plethora of studies has supported their predictive validity in relation to actual behaviours in both theory and practice, accounting for around 60% of intentional variance. Following this line of reasoning, entrepreneurial intentions, commonly defined as the desire either to own or to create one’s own business, are similarly accepted to be the single best predictor of actual engagement in entrepreneurial behaviours.

In this conceptual paper, we track and further extend this expected relationship. This is achieved through focusing on the analysis of ‘entrepreneurial education’, an exogenous variable strongly regarded by literature as an antecedent toward entrepreneurial intention and much more influential than that of ‘general business education’.

This paper explores the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intentions through a faculty collaboration between EDEM-Business School from Spain and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) from Norway. Both are members of 'Babson Collaborative', an international network of educational institutions mainly focused on entrepreneurship training. The aim of this exploration is to describe two examples of European institutions influenced by different national cultures, both including former students as part of their entrepreneurship education. We wonder how culture affect these educations, and position entrepreneurship education as an ‘exogenous influence’ on attitudes, leading to entrepreneurial intentions.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurial intention, entrepreneurship education, cultural differences.