Resumen de The mediating role of university entrepreneurial ecosystem on students’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy

Prateek Shekhar, Cheryl A. Bodnar

• The importance of developing entrepreneurial skills in students is increasingly getting recognized in engineering education. Severalinstitutions have initiated informal and formal entrepreneurship education programs to expose undergraduate students toentrepreneurial training and practice. Using a wide range of pedagogical approaches and curricular emphasis, entrepreneurshipeducation programs focus on developing an ‘entrepreneurially-minded’ workforce in addition to encouraging venture creation. Asprograms continue to grow, more students will be exposed to entrepreneurship education, which brings with it the opportunity toexamine how students at different institutions or entrepreneurial ecosystems may differ in entrepreneurship-related skills andcharacteristics. In our presented exploratory work, we focus on how students’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy differs based upon theentrepreneurial ecosystem within which students are situated. We use Mc Gee’s Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy scale to assessstudents’ confidence in their ability to perform five entrepreneurship-related tasks – searching, planning, marshaling, implementingfinance, and implementing people. Our findings note statistically significant differences in entrepreneurial self-efficacy for three ofthe five entrepreneurial self-efficacy measures (planning, marshalling, and implementing people). The implications of our work forengineering institutions interested in developing programs related to entrepreneurship are discussed.