Characteristics of the Responsible Entrepreneur: An Empirical Research

Introduction And Research Methods

Once the model, drawn up according to our evaluations, was presented, we asked ourselves what would have been the perception of entrepreneurial education that the possible beneficiaries could have. It is good to remember that the insertion of the values presented in the previous model was made on an arbitrary basis by the authors through what is exposed in the literature.

In order to try to understand on a sample basis the accuracy of our assumptions we have found it useful to empirically validate the first four attributes of each area of the matrix, obtaining a complete evaluation of all the eight characteristics for each attribute.

In this way the data set is presented as the evaluation of a total of 16 areas as well as demographic information for each tested individual such as: age, work experience, gender differentiation.

Synthetically, for each survey it is possible to summarize the aggregate data as shown in Table 1.

The reference sample, after careful consideration, has been identified in a group of students in the first year of the Master's course in Management.

The reason that led to this choice is due to some factors:

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  All students had at least a bachelor's degree of education;

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  All the students having attended the mentioned courses were familiar with the concepts of praxis, pragma and poiesis;

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  The students represented a possible reference target to start an entrepreneurial training path and, therefore, a direct evaluation by students appeared essential to understand the perception of certain issues;

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  Given the previous university experience, the reference sample was familiar with the areas where assessment was required and therefore the risk of cognitive bias was severely limited;

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  The sample was easily accessible and the questionnaires could be administered in a controlled environment such as university lectures, where the level of student participation was presumably high.

Regarding the collection of evidence, we created an ad-hoc questionnaire in which, after entering the demographic data, it was necessary to evaluate for each area the eight variables present in the Kiviat diagram, as exemplified in Table 2.