Meaningful Support for Creating Young Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Providing the most meaningful and suitable support is very essential in the efforts to create young entrepreneurs. The aim of this paper is to investigate the supports that were perceived as the most meaningful for students in their educational process to be an entrepreneur. The findings of this study will present important information for the social network of students in order to be able to give the most suitable support for students. The respondents of this study included 457 students which consisted of 342 undergraduate students who were in semester 6 and 115 students who were in semester 4. They came from a university in urban area in Indonesia, which adopted entrepreneurship education in the curriculum. Students were from various study programs. Gender distribution of the respondents was 50.77% males and 48.36% females. Ages ranged 15-26 years old, with a mean age of 20.91. Data were collected through open-ended questionnaire, coded and analyzed descriptively and inferentially. Results showed that comfort support was the most frequently reported as the most meaningful support among the other types of support. This kind of support was largely provided by parents. Compared to other sources of support, parents were highly reported as the provider of the most meaningful support for students in their process to be an entrepreneur. Detailed findings of the study will be explored further and the implications of the study will be discussed in the paper