A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Laura Galloway, Isla Kapasi and Geoff Whittam
decision to become an entrepreneur. Numerous researchers corroborate that role models are critical
to entrepreneurial potential (e.g., Brockhaus and Horwitz, 2004; Baron, 2007).
Desire
Desire to be self-employed or own a business seems a reasonable antecedent for actually doing so,
and is related to PBC - in particular, locus of control. Locus of control (Rotter, 1966) is the degree to
which individuals feel in control of their destinies, and can be affected by internal (psychological) and
external (social, environmental) circumstances. Several researches have found high locus of control
to be a common personality trait of entrepreneurs (e.g., Llewellyn and Wilson, 2003) and a significant
moderator of intentions and behaviour (Obschonka, et al., 2010). Further, other studies such as
Collins, et al. (2004) have shown that items which suggest high locus of control, e.g. “desire to be my
own boss”, correlate with entrepreneurial potential. Similarly, desire to start a firm or become selfemployed
is an obvious attitudinal (ATT) signal; one is likely to be predisposed to entrepreneurship if
one perceived it as desirous. At first sight this appears obvious and intuitive. Upon inspection,
however, desire for entrepreneurship as an antecedent to intention to be an entrepreneur is far more
cloudy a link than we might expect. It is to this complex issue that we now turn.
The use of the Theory of Planned Behaviour in Entrepreneurship Education Studies
The desire to be self-employed or own a firm appears self-explanatory – you are unlikely to do either
unless you want to. However, this is not, in fact, a safe assumption. Increasingly there is
acknowledgement that self-employment and business ownership can be disparate from any positive
agency-based choice. GEM (eg., Bosma, et al., 2008) identifies ‘necessity entrepreneurship’ and
defines it as self-employment on the basis that there are few or no other financial alternatives for an
individual. This type of entrepreneurship is not innovation driven nor value-adding, and while
represented in all countries, is most prevalent amongst the least wealthy in countries with no welfare
state. As such, its relevance to a study of entrepreneurship education in universities is apparently
limited. However, for graduates in Western economies there is a type of necessity entrepreneurship
reported increasingly in the employment literature.
Employment scholars such as Baldry, et al. (2007) identify the increasing contractualisation of
graduate and professional jobs. Whole industries, including opportunity-rich sectors such as IT, are
increasingly based on sub-contracted self-employment rather than traditional employment (eg.
Bergvall-Kareborn and Howcroft, 2011). The reasons for this include that it is more cost effective for
large firms to subcontract work (Baldry, 2007). Pertinent for the current paper, is that increasingly
graduates and other professionals are finding themselves in an employment environment that
requires them to be self-employed (Robert, et al., 2009). This is a type of entrepreneurship that is
contrary to both PBC and ATT in that choice, efficacy and desirability as antecedents are no longer
valid, and indeed entrepreneurship, thus defined, is in fact a negative outcome for the individual.
Debate about the applicability of the theory of locus of control to entrepreneurship continues (Chell, et
al., 1991), but it seems increasingly clear that entrepreneurship as an outcome may not be as a result
of any control on the part of the individual at all. Despite this, an entrepreneurship education impact
assessment study would measure self-employment as a positive outcome.
The literature therefore suggests two research questions:
� Can the Theory of Planned Behaviour ‘predict’ an action which will lead to entrepreneurial activity
measured by self-employment or the establishment of an SME?
� Did the engagement with an Entrepreneurship course influence ‘planned bahaviour’?
4. Methodology
Qualitative analysis was considered most appropriate for the current study because it allows for
results that reflect the positions of those being studied (Bryman, 1988) and includes therefore that
which cannot be quantified or where being quantified does not provide any meaningful insight
(Cassell and Symon, 1994). While it can be more difficult to generalise results with qualitative
methods than in studies where quantitative methods have been used, Stake (1995, p.40) claims that
through qualitative research we gain vicarious “experiential understanding” of a subject.
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