Entrepreneurship Education And Entrepreneurial Intention: A Comparative Study Of Students From India And The Usa

The field of entrepreneurship is gaining acceptability among the youth in India. This trend has been accelerated since 2015 when the government of India launched the ‘start up’ and ‘stand up India’ initiatives. From the academic perspective, the startup launch, startup funding, and success and failure of a startup and similar concepts have been studied extensively, the entrepreneurial eco system that support, nurture and prepare entrepreneurs needs further examination. One particular aspect of this ecosystem is higher education that will prepare future entrepreneurs in India. In the current paper we argue that entrepreneurship education needs to be explored within the Indian context to understand the creation of better prepared future entrepreneurs. There seems to be a need for education programs specifically designed to expand students’ skills, knowledge and experience in entrepreneurship. In this manuscript we discuss implicit and explicit ways by which the entrepreneurship education might be delivered in the higher education system in India. Using the extant literature we focused on four different aspects of entrepreneurial intentions (EI) among students: (1) ability to have a grand vision (GVS); (2) intentions to exploit opportunities (OEX); (3) perseverance and operational focus (POF); and, (4) willingness to explore risk-taking (RST). We found that in general entrepreneurship students had a higher score concerning overall entrepreneurial intentions whereas Business students were most trained to explore the risk taking component of entrepreneurial intentions (EI). We compare the results obtained from Indian students with students form USA and find interesting results. These results are discussed further.