Education, Training and Networking for Entrepreneurship in ...

Table 9.10
Size of entrepreneurs’ advisory network,
by their competency
Starters and owner-managers in
Denmark 2008
Competent Less
competent
Large network 50 % 33 %
Small network 50 % 67 %
Sum 100 % 100 %
Mean size 7,4 5,7
N entrepreneurs 174 45
The above cross-tabulations have examined the
relationship between two phenomena at a time,
ignoring that the relationship may be affect by
other conditions. The above analyses are thus
preliminaries to an analysis that considers each
phenomenon to have several causes. This more
elaborate analysis comes next.
Effects among entrepreneurs’ education,
training, competency and networking
The question now is, what are the effects among
entrepreneurs’ education, training, competency
and networking?
More precisely, how is network size affected
jointly by competency, training and education?
How is competency affected jointly by training
and education? How is training affected by education,
while also taking other conditions into
consideration, such as gender and age of the
entrepreneurs?
what the effects of education are upon networking.
The effects upon entrepreneurs’ competency
from training and education are estimated by
regression (Table 9.12 in the Appendix). Entrepreneurs’
training promotes their competency,
as we would expect. The frame of reference for
ascertaining the effects of education is long
higher education. Entrepreneurs with medium
or short higher education tend to be less competent
than entrepreneurs with long higher education.
Entrepreneurs who have neither vocational
nor higher education also tend to be less
competent than entrepreneurs with long higher
education. Vocationally educated entrepreneurs
tend to be as competent as entrepreneurs
with long higher education.
The effects upon entrepreneurs’ training from
education are estimated by regression (Table
9.11 in the Appendix). Entrepreneurs with vocational
education, with short or medium higher
education, or without vocational or higher education
have received training more frequently
than entrepreneurs with long higher education.
In other words, entrepreneurs with long higher
education have especially rarely been trained in
starting a business.
These estimated effects are shown in Figure
9.2, where a positive effect is shown as a solid
arrow and a negative effect as a dashed arrow,
and the magnitude of an effect is shown by the
thickness of the arrow.
The effects upon entrepreneurs’ network size
from competency, training and education are
estimated by regresssion (Table 9.13 in the
Appendix). Training has a very large and positive
effect upon networking. Competency also
has a large and positive effect upon networking.
The effects of the various levels of education
are hard to estimate because the size of
the sample in each educational group is small,
so small that we do not obtain statistical significance
when testing the effects. So we cannot
conclude, with any reasonable confidence,
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