Underlying Factors of Entrepreneurial Intentions among Asian Students

IntroductionNowadays, entrepreneurship is considered as one of the future drivers for Asian economy. Although the majority of Asia's economies are developing ones, the region boasts 90 of the world's 691 billionaires GDP (Faustino, 2005). Yet, despite their rising incomes and rapid economic growth, Asian countries still face widespread and pervasive poverty. This picture indicates the importance of entrepreneurial skills in this region. Given this, educational or training programs particularly for young people in order to stimulate knowledge awareness/acquisition on entrepreneurship and to start up a business are necessary.Many studies have been conducted to explore and investigate entrepreneurial intentions and behaviour using various entrepreneurial indicators, such as environment and personality indicators (Mazzarol et al., 1999); psychological characteristics e.g. need for achievement (Green et al., 1996; Sengupta and Debnath, 1994). Another study by Misra and Kumar (2000) proposed a model to explain entrepreneurial behavior that incorporated several factors, such as entrepreneurial intentions, entrepreneurial environment, and demographic, psychological and situational factors. Moreover, Morrison (2000) pointed out that there was relationship between entrepreneurship and culture specificity.Furthermore, previous studies found that entrepreneurial intentions among students are a source of creating new business (Gorman et al., 1997; Kourilsky and Walstad, 1998). Their attitudes, behaviours, and knowledge on entrepreneurship tend to stimulate their intentions and willingness to start a new venture in the future. Entrepreneurial intention is defined as a process of information-searching which can be used to achieve a new venture (Katz and Gartner, 1988). People with intention to start a new venture are more ready and have better progress in running a new business rather than those without. According to Krueger and Carsrud (1993), entrepreneurial intention is recognized as the best predictor for entrepreneurial behavior. Therefore, entrepreneurial intention can be used as a basic approach to understand who want to be an entrepreneur (Choo and Wong, 2006).This study aimed to examine what factors determined the students' entrepreneurial intentions in Asia. The Asia Development Bank (2009) had explored various indicators for Asia and Pacific's development; and found that the dynamics of entrepreneurship is dominant for SMEs development in these countries. The study focused on personality and environmental factors. Personality factors include need for achievement (i.e. McClelland, 1961) and self-efficacy (Gilles and Rea, 1999), while environmental factors include factors such as social networks, capital and information access (Mazzarol et al., 1999). Similar studies have been conducted to investigate students' entrepreneurial intentions in Norway (Indarti, 2002), in Indonesia (Kristiansen and Indarti, 2004), in Japan (Indarti and Rostiani, 2008), and in Malaysia (Ismail et al., 2009). This current study was an extension of the initial study by Indarti (2002) by including additional Asian countries to compare, i.e. South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan.The output of the study is expected to participate in the debate, especially with respect to entrepreneurial intentions predictors from different countries in Asia. Furthermore, academic and government in particular may take advantage of the results of this study by taking them into consideration when developing programs to promote entrepreneurship among students. If it is possible, the programs are countryspeci fic. Then, it is expected that fresh graduates will not only be ready to work at companies but they are also prepared to be self-employed, or they are able to apply entrepreneurial principles when working within a company.As discussed previously, this study was mainly intended to investigate what factors (i.e. personality factors, environmental factors, and demographic factors) determined entrepreneurial intentions among Asian students. …