Impacts of Argentina’s crisis in 2018/2019 on students’ entrepreneurial characteristics during the pre-start-up process

ABSTRACT University students have been surveyed regarding entrepreneurial characteristics before and during the Argentine politico-economic crisis in 2018/2019. In 2019 the country’s unemployment rate reached its peak since 2006. During crises self-employment is considered more often, and higher rates of start-ups creating high-skilled labor could counter Argentina’s innovation gap. The during-crisis students are more necessity-driven to business creation than their stronger opportunity-driven pre-crisis counterparts. Students as potential founders of innovative start-ups require demand-oriented entrepreneurship support at their universities, which enables continuous individual learning processes creating fundamental entrepreneurial qualifications and facilitating business opportunity recognition and assessment. Currently, a promising starting point is inciting the students’ pull motives to business creation.