THE EFFECT OF ENTREPRENEURIAL PASSION AND OPPORTUNITY AWARENESS TOWARD THE SUSTAINABILITY OF STARTUP BUSINESSES

Abstract

The decreasing number of unemployment rate in Indonesia is caused by the growth of entrepreneurship in Indonesia, which is proven by the number of startup businesses in Indonesia that reaches the sixth highest worldwide (Statista, 2017). Nevertheless, startup businesses have a high rate of failure, where two in three established startup businesses fail. With the purpose to find out the reason of this phenomenon, this research aims to discover whether entrepreneurial passion and opportunity awareness have significant effects to the sustainability of startup businesses. This research uses the startup businesses of Ciputra University’s 2015 batch students that have been running for minimum 2 years as the sample. These startup businesses are hoped to represent sustainable startup businesses since from more than 200 startup businesses established by Ciputra University’s 2015 batch students, only 42 startup businesses that sustain. Paper-based and online questionnaire are distributed to the samples using 5-point Likert- scale questionnaire, and the data collected is then analyzed using Multiple Linear Regression. The result shows that entrepreneurial passion hasa significant effect toward startup business sustainability, but not for opportunity awareness. Opportunity awareness does not significantly affect startup business sustainability since opportunity awareness needs to be converted into opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation in order to have significant effects.