Promoting entrepreneurship has become an important policy strategy in Europe in the hope to stimulate the crisis-shaken economy. In this paper, we caution against undue expectations. Using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for 17 European countries, we find that a considerable proportion of the new entrepreneurs have started a business despite a negative perception of business opportunities as well as lack of confidence in their own entrepreneurial skills. This proportion has increased during the economic crisis, especially in those countries which were particularly affected by economic downturn and rising unemployment. We extend existing entrepreneurship theories to account for this phenomenon, which we call Bnons-entrepreneurship^. Testing the hypotheses derived from our model, we find that the primary motivation for these people to turn to entrepreneurship is the lack of other options to enter the labour market during the economic crisis. Still, this sort of Bdesperate^entrepreneurship does not equal necessity based entrepreneurship, warranting further research.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The aim of our article is to examine the entrepreneurial characteristics of university students in diff erent disciplines, and to develop implications and recommendations for entrepreneurship education programing according to the observed diff erences. The main research question is to identify whether students from diff erent selected disciplines exhibit diff erent rates of enterprising potential (i.e. tendency to start up and manage projects), and if so, which are the diff erentiating attributes. To answer this question we conducted a study using the General Enterprising Tendency v2 Test (GET2 test) and analysed the enterprising potential of 370 university students in four diff erent majors (business administration, applied informatics, psychology and pedagogy). The fi ndings of our analysis suggest that there are signifi cant diff erences in the general enterprising tendency levels, as well as in levels of three out of fi ve its components (namely need for achievement, calculated risk taking and internal locus of control) between the students in analysed majors. In other words, students in diff erent disciplines exhibit diff erent rates of entrepreneurial predispositions. In our article we present and further discuss these fi ndings, especially from the entrepreneurship education perspective in its broadest sense.