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Tertiary education and startups – Part 1 of 3

Tertiary education and startups – Part 1 of 2
Anastasios Vasileiadis
by Anastasios Vasileiadis
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Entrepreneurship and startups as a research field attracts the interest of many researchers because it is a tool of development for many economies in the world.

The investigation of the factors that leads particular people to become entrepreneurs instead of others has been a question of many researches. So, many researchers have tried to understand the reasons leading those people to entrepreneurship. Toward that direction theories (Ajzen, 1991) and models (Shapero & Sokol, 1982; Krueger & Brazeal, 1994; Linan, 2005) were developed, and focused on the intentions that make people undertake entrepreneurship action, because the intentions are the best predictor factor for the future behavior of a person, such as the foundation of an enterprise (Ajzen, 1991; Krueger, 2005).

So it is supported, that by formulating fundamental theories for the entrepreneurial intentions, we can explain a basic peace of the field of entrepreneurship. Of course there are some factors that contribute to the prediction of the entrepreneurial intentions such as the attitude and the degree of desirability toward that behavior and the level of the feasibility (Krueger, 2005).

As other factors defining the intentions of entrepreneurship are mentioned such as propensity to action, personal convictions and other “demographic” variables such as gender, age, educational level and economic environment (Davidsson, 1995).

The study of entrepreneurship among graduates of tertiary education is a research field that attracts the interest of many researchers worldwide (Bevan et all., 1989; Roberts, 1995; Blackburn, 1997; La Valle et all., 1997; Gibb, 1997).

These researches focus on the relation between education and entrepreneurship and also on the degree that education can influence the decision of the students – graduates to start their own entrepreneurial activity. In recent years the interest towards youth entrepreneurship has been increased as it is an important alternative of professional occupation, especially for the graduates of the tertiary education (Brenner et all., 1991; Hart and Harrison, 1992; Fleming, 1994; Kolvereid, 1996).

But despite all these, there are few research efforts that focused on the relationship between the entrepreneurial activity of the graduates and the degree of necessary supplies, with which education provides to young, to establish and run their own business and the graduates’ opinion about the usefulness of knowledge gained during their studies, is quite interesting.

Moreover it is important to study the interval time that intervenes between graduation and companies’ start up process and of course in relation with the financial resources that they use for the establishment. Finally our knowledge about the degree of satisfaction among graduates from their entrepreneurial activity is quite limited.

The investigation of the graduates’ opinion for the relationship between education and entrepreneurship is a very important issue since it can be a very important source of feedback for the educational systems worldwide targeting to their readjustment.

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