Drivers and inhibitors of entrepreneurship in Europe's Outermost Regions: Implications for entrepreneurship education

Abstract

Governments of peripheral regions often seek to encourage entrepreneurship as a means of bolstering employment, typically charging higher education institutions with the task of delivering this mission through their entrepreneurship education programmes. This study investigates the drivers and inhibitors of entrepreneurial intentions among young people in Madeira, a semi-autonomous outlying region of Portugal. Data were collected from 352 final-year undergraduate students on management, economics and tourism courses. The adaptive Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator method was then applied to select the best predictors from among a large pool of potential covariates. The results found that students with less access to start-up finance and a greater fear of failure tended to have the least entrepreneurial intentions. Children of entrepreneurs had significantly stronger intentions to become entrepreneurs themselves. Entrepreneurial intention also increased significantly with the student's age. The paper concludes that entrepreneurial education providers in island economies firstly need to change the narrative that young people in peripheral regions receive about becoming entrepreneurs, particularly with regard to the greater vulnerability to business risks (the ‘island penalty factor’), and secondly should provide practical support to students who do not have access to family business networks (a possible ‘island bonus factor’).