Entrepreneurship in young adults: Initial findings from the young entrepreneurs study ¬リニ

a r t i c l e i n f o The scientific study of youth entrepreneurship is truly in its infancy, with research on the development of entre-preneurship constrained by theoretical foundations that rely on static, trait-like approaches that equate entrepre-neurship with stable personality characteristics. In this article, we define entrepreneurship as a fluid process that relies on the bidirectional interplay between a developing individual and his or her context. We report initial findings from the Young Entrepreneurs Study that clarify how entrepreneurial intentions and actions manifest in youth. We present quantitative analyses that examined the relations between entrepreneurial strengths and entrepreneurial activities in a sample of 3461 college students, and we describe the results of semi-structured interviews from a 48-person subset of our larger sample that explored how entrepreneurial intentions and actions manifested in our sample. We describe a mixed-method triangulation that integrates these two sets of findings, then discuss implications for future research. Successful entrepreneurship, which we define as including both serial business creation and long-term business ownership (e.g., Schumpeter, 1934), offers a viable pathway to economic growth (Clifton, 2011) and personal fulfillment (Damon & Lerner, 2008). Yet, like all developmental outcomes, entrepreneurship does not occur in a vacuum. The development of entrepreneurship requires social and economic conditions that promote entrepreneurial activity as well as individual capacities that help individuals create and sustain productive enterprises. Economics and business management scholars have devoted considerable attention to the societal and economic conditions that promote free enterprise a brief overview), and psychological researchers have investigated the individual capacities and characteristics associated with entrepreneurial success (e.g., Schmitt-Rodermund, 2004). Previous research, however, has primarily focused on entrepreneurship in adults, so little is known about how young people interact with social and economic contexts to acquire entrepreneurial capacities (Damon & Lerner, 2008). The transition to adulthood is an important period for understanding successful entrepreneurship; although nearly half of American youth report having plans to start their own businesses (Gallup & Operation Hope, 2012), only about 10% of the U.S. adult population is engaged in entrepreneurial activities (Kelly et al., 2012). This discrepancy between youth's aspirations and adults' activities highlights the importance of understanding whether and how young people develop entrepreneurial intent and succeed in entrepreneurial activities during the transition to adulthood. In this paper we address this issue by examining how entre-preneurial interests and actions are manifested in a sample of college-aged participants. …