Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Development Goals: A Multigroup Analysis of the Moderating Effects of Entrepreneurship Education on Entrepreneurial Intention

Abstract

The role of entrepreneurs in attaining Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is paramount. Entrepreneurs with strong awareness and commitment to sustainable development help to attain almost all SDGs, as they create businesses that will help employment, eliminate poverty, provide decent work and economic growth, help to reduce hunger, assist in attaining good health and wellbeing, help to achieve affordable and clean energy, and enhance their industries. Realizing the importance of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, the government of Malaysia has taken proactive actions to develop and inculcate the entrepreneurial mindset through entrepreneurship education at higher education. This study aims to apply the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to analyze the effect of an entrepreneurship course on entrepreneurial intentions of the engineering students at Universiti Teknologi Petronas, as entrepreneurial intention is effective in predicting behavior. A quantitative technique and descriptive cross-sectional study have been employed to collect data. The result of this study indicates that the TPB explains and predicts the entrepreneurial intention. However, the Multigroup Analysis (MGA) results show that attending the entrepreneurship course does not increase the strength of the relationship between the exogenous and endogenous construct compared to those who do not attend the course. The results of this study raise a positive implication toward the improvement of the course curriculum and the teaching pedagogy. An in-depth qualitative study to understand the issue will help to improve the curriculum and pedagogy of entrepreneurship education, and eventually enable a realization of the government’s aspirations.

Assessing the impact of entrepreneurial education activity on entrepreneurial intention and behavior: role of behavioral entrepreneurial mindset

“…To cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset, several supporting dimensions include entrepreneurial education (Santos et al 2021), attitudes toward entrepreneurship (Ashari et al 2022), and self-efficacy (Mensah et al 2021). According to Lopez et al (2021) social cognitive theory, learning about entrepreneurship increases one's sense of self-efficacy.…”

Entrepreneurship for sustainable development: co-evolutionary evidence from the tourism sector

“…This is even more the case in the tourism industry (Papaluca et al, 2020), where entrepreneurs with awareness and commitment to sustainable development help to create new and innovative firms (Paniccia and Leoni, 2019), increasing employment and enhancing identity and heritage through the efficient use of resources, thus ameliorating life quality (Belias et al, 2022;Figueroa-Domecq et al, 2022;Sardianou et al, 2016). At the same time, it is also true that entrepreneurial sustainable-oriented mindsets, motivations and values need to be counterbalanced by knowledge and education, especially at the university level (Ashari et al, 2021;Deale, 2016). Most current tourism entrepreneurs did not receive a university education but consider it crucial for the development of the (sustainable) entrepreneurs of tomorrow.…”

Bibliometric Analysis of Digital Entrepreneurial Education and Student Intention; Reviewed and Analyzed by VOSViewer from Google Scholar

“…The main future direction in this paper was to make citation mapping and cluster analysis easier. More recent articles are all based on research through paid expensive databases because of which many researchers could not show their real potential in this methodology, no matter their relative contribution [13] [35]. The limitation of this paper is that it cannot be possible to access all articles as most of the prestigious journals are paid and cannot be accessed from Google Scholar.…”