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Entrepreneurial Intentions - Conceptual approaches and new directions

by Anastasios Vasileiadis

During the past few years investigation of the social and economic phenomena are creating an interest for many researchers, and especially with regards to the impact that these have on people and social growth.

One of the fields that have stirred the interest of scientific community is that of entrepreneurship, constituting an important parameter of both social and economic progress of many countries.

Despite extensive scientific dialogue, significant difficulties are presented both in the formulation of constitutive theories of entrepreneurship and the full comprehension of the phenomenon.

However, by surpassing specific weaknesses of international bibliography, certain researchers did not focus their attention only on variables that influence it, but they tried to comprehend the reasons for which individuals become entrepreneurs.

Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) and other models (Shapero and Sokol, 1982; Krueger & Brazeal, 1994; Linan, 2005) developed in this direction and focused their attention on the “intentions” of individuals for the undertaking the entrepreneurial activities.

Entrepreneurial intentions are the decision – commitment of an individual to begin entrepreneurial activity, while in cognitive psychology it is the cognitive state that precedes the adoption of specific behaviour (Krueger, 2005).

Further, it is supported that intentions constitute the better predicting factor for future behaviour of the individual, such as the development or initiation of business for example (Krueger, 1993).

Factors that were mentioned to contribute to the prediction of entrepreneurial intentions were the attitude of the individual to the given behavior, the degree of desirability towards it, but also the degree of feasibility that the individual considers it to have.

Further reported were the propensity of an individual to act, personal convictions and environmental factors, such as social norms as well as demographic factors as gender, age, educational level, constitute according to particular predicting variables the entrepreneurial intentions.