Nascent entrepreneurship in university students: the role of the context

This paper offers evidence that the context might influence a university student’s start-up process differently, depending on the category of activities and regions. Specifically, it explores the influence of university and national contexts while considering the different categories of the start-up process. Our approach divides the start-up process into three categories (Business planning, Interaction with the external environment, and Financing), four context definitions (University, Industry-technological, Institutional-policy, and Cultural), and three regions (European Union, Latin America, and Asian-African). We drew on the primary dataset of the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS) project that contains 7,628 nascent entrepreneurs from 21 countries, which we complemented with a set of international indexes from the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index, the Global Entrepreneurship Index, and the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness project. Generally speaking, the University context positively influences the start-up activities of students in Europe and Asia-Africa. The Industry and technological context and the Institutional and policy context play a relevant role (sometimes positive or negative) depending on the activity and region. Finally, the Cultural context presents mixed results too, and its influence varies (positively and negatively) depending on the kind of start-up activities and the region.