A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Luc De Grez and Dirk Van Lindt
successfully performing the various roles and tasks of entrepreneurship”. But how can education raise
self-efficacy? Bandura (1997) discerns four sources of self-efficacy. The first and most important
source is enactive mastery experience. A successful performance raises self-efficacy not just through
the performance but through the interpretation of several personal (e.g. effort) and situational (e.g.
received aid) factors. A complete description of this process goes beyond the intended scope of this
paper.
The second source of self-efficacy is vicarious experience or modeling. Observing a successful model
can enhance self-efficacy. The third source of self-efficacy is verbal persuasion and can be linked to
giving feedback after performance. The fourth source is the physiological and affective state.
Analyzing the presence of these self-efficacy sources in entrepreneurship education facilitates the
making of a distinction between traditional courses and learning by doing programs. The latter seem
to provide many more opportunities to enhance self-efficacy. Learning by doing programs provide
much more authentic evidence that learners can succeed and generally provide more modeling
opportunities. We can hypothesize that learning by doing programs enhance entrepreneurial selfefficacy.
Chen et al (1998) also found that entrepreneurial self-efficacy is positively related to the intention of
setting up one’s own business. The limited circumscription of entrepreneurship, namely starting a new
business, is also included in the definition outlined in the first paragraph. On the basis of the positive
relationship between self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intentions, it could be hypothesized that
learning by doing programs could enhance these intentions. Studies however show mixed results.
Some authors ( e.g. Souitaris, Zerbinati and Al-Laham, 2007) report that entrepreneurship programs
can enhance entrepreneurial intentions, but others (Oosterbeek, van Praag andIJsselstein, 2010)
even found that the effect on the intention to become an entrepreneur was negative. It should be
noted that measurement instruments and participants were different in both studies. So it could be
interesting to investigate whether learning by doing programs can stimulate the intention to set up
one’s own business.
The social cognitive theoretical framework is about much more than self-efficacy. One very
fundamental aspect of the framework is the consideration that learning outcomes are the result of the
interplay between environment and personal factors (Bandura, 1997).From this point of view,
personal and environmental variables have to be included in the study.
Starting with personal variables, it is clear that individuals may differ on many variables. Therefore this
study opted to investigate several personal variables at the same time. This approachwill influence
the choice of measurement instruments. It will necessitate the choice of short versions of the
instruments.
The fact that the variable ‘intention to set up a business’ is situated in the future reflects the decision
to include a variable about students’ perceptions of their future. It shows that “…students’ motivation
is profoundly affected by their conceptualizations of their future” (Kauffman and Husman, 2004: 3) and
this is called a future time perspective. Shell and Husman (2001: 499) found “…a joint relation of
higher self-efficacy and higher future time perspective to higher achievement”. They hypothesize that
students who have stronger tendency to extend their behavior into the future could be better able to
project their abilities in the future and have higher self-efficacy. This hypothesis could be tested in this
paper.
The Big Five is a measurement instrument concerning individual differences that is widely used in
different domains. The instrument measures five personality dimensions and is also used in the
domain of entrepreneurship, as two meta-analytical reviews show (Zhao, & Seibert, 2006; Zhao,
Seibert, & Lumpkin, 2010). Of the five personality dimensions, openness to experience,
conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion and agreeableness, only the last dimension was
unrelated to entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial performance ( Zhao et al, 2010).
The choice of the last personal variable to be included in the study is inspired by the student-centered
nature of learning by doing programs. In order to take maximum advantage of these programs,
students must be capable of self-directing their learning. Stewart (2007) reported that selfmanagement
was the best predictor for achieving learning outcomes from project-based learning.
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