IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-05731988.html

Personal relationships and university entrepreneurship centre (UEC): complementarity or substitution in shaping student entrepreneurs’ social capital?

Author

Listed:
  • Pauline Brunner

    (BETA - Bureau d'Économie Théorique et Appliquée - AgroParisTech - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg - Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) - Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) Mulhouse - Colmar - UL - Université de Lorraine - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, UNISTRA FSEG - Faculté des sciences économiques et de gestion [Strasbourg] - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg)

  • Véronique Schaeffer

    (BETA - Bureau d'Économie Théorique et Appliquée - AgroParisTech - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg - Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) - Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) Mulhouse - Colmar - UL - Université de Lorraine - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

Abstract

This article investigates whether resources obtained from personal relationships, such as family and friends, support or inhibit the role of university entrepreneurship centres (UECs) in shaping the social capital of student entrepreneurs. Drawing on social capital theory and entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) frameworks, we examine how resources obtained from strong links, namely family and friends, influence student entrepreneurs' connections with a diverse range of actors beyond their usual relationships, particularly within EEs external to the university setting. We administered a questionnaire survey yielding 210 responses from student entrepreneurs enrolled in the French national extracurricular entrepreneurship programme Pépite, implemented by UECs. The study reveals three principal findings. First, personal relationships do not inhibit the role of UECs in shaping the social capital of student entrepreneurs. Second, UECs serve as a substitute when personal relationships do not provide resources for the project. Third, the results highlight the importance of project maturity in enabling students to establish connections with a broader range of actors external to the university within the EE.

Suggested Citation

  • Pauline Brunner & Véronique Schaeffer, 2026. "Personal relationships and university entrepreneurship centre (UEC): complementarity or substitution in shaping student entrepreneurs’ social capital?," Post-Print hal-05731988, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05731988
    DOI: 10.1080/08985626.2026.2716115
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05731988. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.