Effect of University Support, Societal Values and Propensity to Act on Entrepreneurial Intentions among Students from Two Kenyan Universities

INTRODUCTION:Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial culture are getting increased amount of attention in both academic research and general practice. Entrepreneurship is linked with adding value and as such, it has an impetus on economic growth, business growth, and employment creation globally. Empirical research supports positive links between entrepreneurial activity, economic growth and innovation. This explains why there is an increased focus in designing educational programmes to encourage entrepreneurship and to provide a fertile ground for business start-ups (Kuratko, 2005). However, the role of entrepreneurship and innovation has not been adequately addressed in the field of university education especially in developing nations (Knudson, Wysocki, Champagne, & Peterson, 2004). Academic institutions such as universities have become incubation avenues where entrepreneurial culture is inculcated among students (Nastiti, Indarti, & Rostiani, 2010). Furthermore, universities play a crucial role in fostering entrepreneurship education with a view to propel the students toward moving into self-employment once they are through with their university education. According to (Sahban, Ramalu, & Syhputra, 2016), universities are supposed to nurture youth as 'active job creators'. The large number of candidates entering the labour market from universities make 'entrepreneurship' a subject of research in universities.According to (Nastiti, Indarti, & Rostiani, 2010) the decision to start a new firm is assumed to be planned for a period of time and thus preceded by an intention to do so. However, this intention may or may not lead to an actual business start-up. Thus, entrepreneurial intentions predict, although not very accurately, individuals' choice to initiate their own business ventures. Thus, entrepreneurial intention is seen as the first move in the evolution of long term process of venture creation (Lee & Wong, 2004) (Fayolle, Gailly, & Lassas-Clerc, 2006) observed that the intention to start a business, then would be a preceding element toward performing entrepreneurial behaviour of venture creation. (Ajzen, 2002) Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behaviour posits that intentions toward a given behaviour would be the single best predictor of that behaviour (Linan & Chen, 2006). According to (Lee & Wong, 2004) and Bird (1988), the intention of carrying out a given behaviour may be affected by several factors such as needs, values, wants, habits, and beliefs. They have identified specific situational factors such as time constraints, task difficulty and the influence of other people through social pressure and societal values as influential factors to entrepreneurial intentions. For this study, the factors considered to influence entrepreneurial intentions among university students were societal values, university educational support and propensity to act.OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY:The specific objectives of the study were:1. To examine the extent to which university support influences university students' entrepreneurial intentions.2. To determine the effect of societal values on university students' entrepreneurial intentions.3. To establish the effect of propensity to act on students' entrepreneurial intentions.LITERATURE REVIEW:Entrepreneurial intentions:During the period 1990s to 2010s, economic policies and academic research have associated entrepreneurial activity to economic growth (Audretsch, Keilbach, 2004; (Van Praag & Versloot, 2007); (Linan, Rodriguez-Cohard, & Rueda-Cantuche, 2011). Entrepreneurship is also associated with the development of technical innovations and lead to the growth of employment and competitiveness in business undertakings (Van Praag & Versloot, 2007); (Nystrom, 2008). As such, interest for supporting entrepreneurship, particularly by universities as well as by governments is evident, through development of entrepreneurial infrastructure; to subsidized financing and entrepreneurship education (Otuya, Kibas, Gichira, & Martin, 2013). …