Towards entrepreneurial excellence through entrepreneurship education: an analysis on the students in UKM Malaysia

Resumen

Can entrepreneurs be created through education? Entrepreneurship education programs started to growth and receive attention from countries all over the world since it was first taught in Harvard in 1947. The reason was due to the interconnection between entrepreneurship and economic development. Promotion of entrepreneurship becomes important due to demand by government, students, SMEs and large companies (Fayolle, 2007). The best tool found so far to predict behavior is through the measurement of intention (Ajzen, 1991). In the entrepreneurship literature, many studies have been focused on the Theory of Planned Behavior, which related to entrepreneurial intentions. Several authors, such as Fayolle et al. (2006), have made calls to use this theory as a common framework to evaluate entrepreneurship education (EE). However, only few studies have looked at the components inside the EE that may answer the question “who teaches (trainer), what (course content) and how (teaching method)” as the moderating variables on the relationship from EE to entrepreneurial intention. Therefore, this study aims to fill in the gap by evaluating the moderated effect of entrepreneurship education, through these variables, toward the intention and skills among the undergraduate university students in the context of Malaysia. This research will use TPB framework to understand the connection between these components of entrepreneurship education programs and the impact on the students’ entrepreneurial intention. The study is conducted in UKM, Malaysia. The research population consists of first year students across all disciplines. The status of the course is compulsory and is the first time it is introduced in Malaysia. This study use a longitudinal quantitative method. Twostage data collection was carried-out, including pre- and post-course data collections. An online survey was used. The number of respondents was 493 for the pre-course and 149 for the post-course. The outcome of the study showed that both the trainer and the participation of an invited speaker moderate the relationship between attitude and intention. The effect is moderate in strength, but it showed the important role that can be played by these two elements to influence the entrepreneurial intention among student. For the comparison between genders, the results showed that males exhibit a higher entrepreneurial interest in entrepreneurship, when compared to the female students. However, regarding the number of students in public universities in Malaysia, females students are the majority. The results also show that the ethnic group benefitting the most from EE is the Malay. They have higher interest toward entrepreneurship, even though this field has traditionally been dominated by the Chinese since the colonial period. Finally, as in many previous studies, the results showed that students in the Faculty of Economic and Management benefit the most in term of interest toward the course. Some recommendations for the future may be derived from this dissertation. The government should start focusing on female students, since their participation in the labour market (activity rate) is low when compared to their number of females in the population and the students entering university. Thus, this activity rate is expected to rise in the future. Additionally, the lecturers of this course should be given special training on how to attract students’ interest, as pointed out by Soutaris et al. (2007). Regarding the structure of the course, a combination including the lecturer and successful invited entrepreneurs should be encouraged, so the inspiration part can be conveyed to the students.